http-server: a command-line http server

http-server is a simple, zero-configuration command-line http server. It is powerful enough for production usage, but it's simple and hackable enough to be used for testing, local development, and learning.

Installing globally:

Installation via npm:

 npm install http-server -g

This will install http-server globally so that it may be run from the command line.

Usage:

 http-server [path] [options]

[path] defaults to ./public if the folder exists, and ./ otherwise.

Now you can visit http://localhost:8080 to view your server

Note: Caching is on by default. Add -c-1 as an option to disable caching.

Available Options:

-p Port to use (defaults to 8080)

-a Address to use (defaults to 0.0.0.0)

-d Show directory listings (defaults to true)

-i Display autoIndex (defaults to true)

-g or --gzip When enabled (defaults to false) it will serve ./public/some-file.js.gz in place of ./public/some-file.js when a gzipped version of the file exists and the request accepts gzip encoding.

-e or --ext Default file extension if none supplied (defaults to html)

-s or --silent Suppress log messages from output

--cors Enable CORS via the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header

-o Open browser window after starting the server

-c Set cache time (in seconds) for cache-control max-age header, e.g. -c10 for 10 seconds (defaults to 3600). To disable caching, use -c-1.

-U or --utc Use UTC time format in log messages.

-P or --proxy Proxies all requests which can't be resolved locally to the given url. e.g.: -P http://someurl.com

-S or --ssl Enable https.

-C or --cert Path to ssl cert file (default: cert.pem).

-K or --key Path to ssl key file (default: key.pem).

-r or --robots Provide a /robots.txt (whose content defaults to User-agent: *\nDisallow: /)

-h or --help Print this list and exit.

Magic Files

• index.html will be served as the default file to any directory requests.
• 404.html will be served if a file is not found. This can be used for Single-Page App (SPA) hosting to serve the entry page.

Development

Checkout this repository locally, then:

$ npm i
$ node bin/http-server

Now you can visit http://localhost:8080 to view your server

You should see the turtle image in the screenshot above hosted at that URL. See the ./public folder for demo content.