Month: March 2012

I don’t use Python on a daily basis, barely at all in fact (knowingly), but I stumbled across a handy purpose for it today which I see myself using. Type this command in a Linux shell or a Mac OS terminal and it will start a local web server on port 8000 using the current working directory as the document root and sending access requests to STDOUT:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Potential uses include:

1. Developing local web applications on the local filesystem which use no server-side processing but do use Javascript and AJAX calls that a web browser would not normally allow without starting it with special flags (anyone who’s seen “XMLHttpRequest cannot load $RESOURCE. Origin null is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin” in their error console will know what I’m talking about).
2. Quickly sharing a directory with a colleague on the same network rather than uploading files to a shared resource such as a file server or e-mail system. Obviously you’d need to ensure that whatever port you choose is allowed in your local incoming firewall if you have one.

There’s even better news for PHP users. PHP 5.4, released this week, includes a built-in web server which can be started with an equivalent command. The advantages of this of course is that it’ll also process PHP scripts instead of being limited to static files.