Serving Static Files in LAN

While working on web UIs, it is often convenient to serve static files over HTTP in the local network, in order to test on multiple devices.

OS X comes with apachectl, the Apache HTTP Server Control Interface, which helps to control the preinstalled Apache HTTP server on your Mac.

To serve a particular directory on your system, you have to specify it in the Apache HTTP server configuration file located at:

/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Change these two lines (170 and 197 in my case):

DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">

… to point to your desired path:

DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/site"
<Directory "/path/to/your/site">

Start the server:

$ sudo apachectl restart

Now you can browse to http://YourComputerName.local with your phone or tablet to check your responsive design (located at /path/to/your/site on your Mac).

Trivial, of course, but I kept forgetting. Maybe now, having it noted here, on the next, rather rare, occassion, when I have to fiddle with CSS, I will remember.

But wait! You don’t really want to have httpd running on your system, do you—I mean, who could possibly want that? Why not use Node to write a little server and save it to a file named stserver.js?

var http = require("http");
var st = require("st");

http.createServer(st("/path/to/your/site")).listen(80);

Start the server (as root because of port 80):

$ sudo node stserver.js

Browse to http://YourComputerName.local to test.

Less fluff, more buff! The st module serves static files, does etags, caching, etc. In fact, it also comes with a CLI—so, if installed globally:

$ npm install -g st

… you can spawn a server from the command-line:

$ sudo st -p 80 -d /path/to/your/site

What about Python? I cannot withhold the simplest way to serve the current working directory on OS X:

$ sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80

Python is preinstalled on OS X; I should use it more often—not only in LLDB, once in a blue moon.