On a Mac OS X system, you can use Python to start a simple web server in any directory by opening a Terminal window (the Terminal program is found in
Applications/Utilities) and entering the command
python -m SimpleHTTPServer port with port being
the port you wish to access the web server on. Typically,
web servers listen on
TCP port 80 for
HTTP connections, but you can specify any currently unused
port on the system with the caveat that if you pick a
well-known port, i.e., a port less than 1,024,
then you will need to prefix the command with
sudo to run
the command as root, .e.g, sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80.
However, you can pick ports above 1,023, such as 8080, without using sudo.
E.g., python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080. If you issued that
command, you should see Python respond with "Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080
..." Then, within a browser, you could access an HTML file in the directory
from which you issued the command with
http://localhost:8080/filename. E.g., if I wished to
display a file named test.html, I could use
http://localhost:8080/test.html. If test.html was
just a simple HTML file, I would see GET /test.html HTTP/1.1" 200
displayed on the command line where the Python command was issued. The
"200"
at the end of the line is an
HTTP status code indicating a successful HTTP request.
If you have a file named index.html in the directory, then
just as with a normal webserver, you don't need to specify it to view its
contents. E.g. http://localhost:8080 would be sufficient for
displaying index.html. If there are links to images within
index.html, Python would display the relevant
HTTP GET commands the browser issued to retrieve the images.
When you wish to stop Python from listening on the specified port, you can use the control-C keys to stop the web server and return to the shell prompt. Note: you will see some error messages displayed when you do so.
Below is the output displayed by Python when I first accessed a file
named test.html and then when I accessed the index.html
file in the same directory. The index.html file had links
to 4 image files contained in the same directory as the index.html
file, so the GET commands issued by the browser are displayed for those as
well. The 127.0.0.1 IP address is the localhost address. The
last line shown was produced when I hit the control and "C" keys.
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080 Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ... 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:14] "GET /test.html HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:32] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:32] "GET /vlc_dmg.png HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:32] "GET /vlc_internet_download.png HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:32] "GET /check_album_art.png HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:32] "GET /vlc_media_player.png HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jun/2016 00:00:32] "GET /jamendo_selections.png HTTP/1.1" 200 - ^C
