I am building some HTML page. I can do some things with an HTML files on my hard disk, although these are locked down for security reasons. So I run a local server to serve those files and have my browser treat them like part of the real internet.
Usually for local testing, serving the files unencrypted (plain HTTP) is enough; sometimes for weird edge-case reasons I need encrypted (keywords: HTTPS/SSL/TLS) which is a whole ’nother thing.
One-liners
There is a sport of writing HTTP server one-liners, and a mini site for them. Here are some strategic selections from those.
bareback
Bareback feature-free somehow-works HTTP with netcat:
nc -l 127.0.0.1 8889 < foo.htmlpython
This is reasonably simple and serves static files with little fuss.
python3 -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1VS Code
Live Preview runs a sophisticated integrated server inside VS code.
Caddy
Caddy, is a free and open source server, and that will get you a long way. It has automatic SSL. It supporting plugins for totally OTT features such as AWS lambda function proxying and automatic hugo for plain text blogging.
caddy file-server --listen 127.0.0.1:2019npm servers
For node browser apps, e.g. beefy
and run-browser and
their ilk might work and probably integrate with your build process.
There are so many different options for node that I usually pass over it in choice-paralyzed silence.
Fenix is a GUI wrapped around a node-style server that promises advanced debugging/introspection features. But I haven’t used it and it doesn’t run on Linux, so ignoring for now.
For netlify users in particular there is the netlify dev server
netlify dev --liveIt has many features including draft deployments and ssh tunnel configuration for private preview.
R
As mentioned at R HTML slides I use this CLI script, which is has a couple of useful features such as auto-watching for file changes.
#!/usr/bin/env Rscript
library(servr)
port=4000
cmdArgs = commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
if (length(cmdArgs>0)){
port = strtoi(cmdArgs[1])
}
servr::httw(port=port)
browseURL(paste("http://127.0.0.1:", port, sep="")I save it in serve.R and execute it as
serve.R 4000Oh wait but I need encryption
Crap. I understand, but this is tricky in general. Perhaps you don’t truly need SSL? Most SSL-secured things are also available without SSL on localhost domain. Failing that, Caddy is probably easiest. See bonus tips under secure servers.
Bonus time: tunneling
ngrok is a service that allows you to inspect and replay
web service requests from the internet to a local server for analysis.
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