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.

Running on-demand:

Using npx you can run the script without installing it first:

 npx http-server [path] [options]

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 or --port 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. If brotli is also enabled, it will try to serve brotli first.

-b or --brotli When enabled (defaults to false) it will serve ./public/some-file.js.br in place of ./public/some-file.js when a brotli compressed version of the file exists and the request accepts br encoding. If gzip is also enabled, it will try to serve brotli first.

-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 [path] Open browser window after starting the server. Optionally provide a URL path to open. e.g.: -o /other/dir/

-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.

--log-ip Enable logging of the client's IP address (default: false).

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

--username Username for basic authentication [none]

--password Password for basic authentication [none]

-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: /)

--no-dotfiles Do not show dotfiles

-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.

Catch-all redirect

To implement a catch-all redirect, use the index page itself as the proxy with:

http-server --proxy http://localhost:8080?

Note the ? at the end of the proxy URL. Thanks to @houston3 for this clever hack!

Need a self signed SSL Certificate?

Create the cert.pem and key.pem via the command:

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -new -nodes -x509 -days 3650 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem

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.