httpster

Simple http server for quick loading of content.

Installation is done via npm, which is installed along with NodeJS on most platforms.

npm -g install httpster

Then from any directory where you want to have an http service running, just run

httpster

That will start up a web server on port 3333 and let you serve up any static content you wish. If you want to change the port or directory that the server runs from pass in the -p or -d options

httpster -p 8080 -d /home/somedir/public_html

CLI Options

Option	Description
-p or --port	Port for server to run on - defaults to 3333
-d or --dir	Serving directory - defaults to ./, i.e. current directory
-z or --compress	enable gzip response compression
-s or --pushstate	Add support for HTML5 pushstate
-e or --env	setting environmental variables from .env file
-b or --basic_auth	enable basic authentication. Uses environmental variables HTTPSTER_AUTH_USER and HTTPSTER_AUTH_PASS to authenticate
-c or --cors	enable CORS
-l or --symlink	Enable symlink

HTML5 Pushstates

If you want to run a local site that supports HTML5 Pushstates (aka being able to refresh the page), pass in the option -s or --pushstate. This will map all 4oh4's to the index.html you specified as root directory.

Basic Authentication

Since you can use httpster to deploy to PaaS providers like heroku you can now secure those deployments with basic authentication. The -b or --basic_auth options will read the HTTPSTER_AUTH_USER and HTTPSTER_AUTH_PASS variables from your environment for authentication.

httpster -b

or

httpster --basic_auth

If testing this locally you can also use a .env file in the directory you will run httpster from.

HTTPSTER_AUTH_USER=desired_username
HTTPSTER_AUTH_PASS=desired_password

Then use the -e or --env option to specify to load the environmental variables

httpster --env --basic_auth

Symbolic Links

For security purposes symbolic links have been disabled in the default usage. If you need to serve content through symbolic links you can add the following flag when launching httpster.

httpster -l

or

httpster --symlink

Contributions

If you have some issue please feel free to add a ticket here. If you have any suggestions for features that would make this more useful please feel free to let me know.

Thanks to @GarthDB for asking for this and making me realize that I needed it too.