This is really cool for making local apps which have a web-ui instead of gtk/electron based ui.
I've been using this in a lot of small tools(1) where I use this server to load the web-ui in the browser and a PHP script for file IO.
I've been using this in a lot of small tools(1) where I use this server to load the web-ui in the browser and a PHP script for file IO.
Just the other week I made a little app that loads CSV files from a room booking system to create monthly reports, which was done manually by the sole employee of our housing association and took several hours – now it takes minutes.
It's been my go to way to create easily deployed rich GUI apps for the past year or so, and is pretty simple to build with a few shell scripts to put it all together. The resulting html files can be big, but they load really quite fast and since they're deployed on to a machine and not served over a network the size doesn't matter that much. It's also way less than an electron deployment anyway.
Edit: It looks like none of the major bundlers support this feature out of the box, but there is a project called in inliner that does exactly this: https://github.com/remy/inliner
Because I only deploy these locally on desktops it's pretty much pointless to build/obfuscate/optimize anything for transport, it's so fast to load anyway since it's all off the local drive.
Maybe I should write up a how-to or tidy up the workflow and publish, but it's really nothing fancy.