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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

Nobody seems to have posted this yet:

    python -m SimpleHTTPServer

I'd recommend an alias like "serve". It basically puts the current directory online (binds to 0.0.0.0:8000).

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  python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

A makeshift SMTP server that logs all messages to the console.

It does not support large files, so sometimes I have to fall back to https://npmjs.org/package/http-server (npm -g install http-server .. then just run http-server /path)

similarly, you can get a janky json pretty printer by doing:

   curl -s http://some/json/url | python -m json.tool

When your needs stretch beyond that, try 'jq'. http://stedolan.github.io/jq/

For pretty-printing without modification,

    cat myjson | jq '.'

Am I wrong to have long dismissed this as little more than an easter egg, or, at best, a toy server to test basic webpage functionality?

Yes. It's like a ghetto SCP for giving files to people on windows who don't have SCP. You can use it for basic web functionality, you can use it (carefully) as a mechanism for testing or serving test results. I wouldn't keep it running for days, but it's an amazingly useful tool.

Whoa, never thought of it that way. The makeshift SCP is really a good idea!

I use it quite a lot to move files between my computers, stream content to my phone, test out web designs. I suppose it's like net cat, it's useful for some. I think "toy server" is fairly accurate, I can't see anyone using this in production but I can't see people installing nginx on their laptops either.

> I can't see people installing nginx on their laptops either.

OS X comes with apache preinstalled though

The only problem it really solves is if you've got non-relative paths in your HTML/CSS. I've used this a couple of times in those situations.

Just because that's the only problem you use it to solve doesn't mean that's the only problem it solves.

Sorry, wasn't trying to belittle anything (I've actually written a Mac menu bar app that does this exact thing which a couple of designer friends use).

Depends on what you're developing. If you're doing single page apps that get their data from an external service then this is incredibly useful.

Our build process automatically generates a directory tree of HTML-formatted unit test coverage reports. Sometimes it's nice to be able to share links to those reports in a code review. I use python SimpleHTTPServer for that.

Or for Python3: python -m http.server .

Or Ruby: ruby -run -e httpd .

Mind blown. Thanks!

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