You are building some HTML page. You can do some things with an HTML files on your hard disk, although these are locked down for security reasons.
So you run a local server to serve those files and have your browser treat them like part of the real internet.
Usually for local testing, serving the files unencrypted (plain HTTP) is enough; sometimes you need to do 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 two that are likely to work with no further fuss.
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 127.0.0.1Caddy
Caddy, is a free and open source server, and that will get you a long way. It has automatic SSL. It has plugins supporting 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.
Oh wait but I need SSL
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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