A Tiny Easy Webserver for Test Project Directories

I like to try out ideas in little throwaway project directories. It gives me an isolated space to play in, and work on one concept at a time. It’s really handy to have an easy way to start up a web server from the current directory. Here is how I do it:

serve () {
  port="${1:-3000}" 
  ruby -r webrick -e "s = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => $port, :DocumentRoot => Dir.pwd); trap('INT') { s.shutdown }; s.start"
}

This code above createas a bash/zsh function that will start up a server for the current working directory. The server will default to port 3000, but you can also type serve 3001 to put it on a different port. The only prerequisite is that you have a working ruby installed on your system. (Which comes with Mac OS X)

I put this function into my ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or a file that gets included at login, so it’s always available. Then you can just serve from any directory that has an index.html file, and visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

A main advantage of doing this to visit html / js files is that it is an easy way to overcome the CORS/same origin problem where you can’t include scripts.

Another advantage of this is that it makes it very easy to use Jasmine.

There are also some other ways to do this. I’d be very interested to hear what the easiest way to do this on Windows is.