Serve is a small web server (based on WEBrick) that makes it easy to serve ERB or HAML from any directory. Serve is an ideal tool for building HTML prototypes of Rails applications. Serve can also handle SASS, Textile, and Markdown if the appropriate gems are installed.
At a command prompt all you need to type to start serve is:
$ serve
This will launch a WEBrick server which you can access from any Web browser at the following address:
http://localhost:4000
Once the server is going it will output a running log of its activity. To stop the server at any time, type CTRL+C at the command prompt. By default the serve command serves up files from the current directory. To change this behavior, ‘cd` to the appropriate directory before starting serve.
The serve command automatically binds to 0.0.0.0 (localhost) and uses port 4000 by default. To serve files over a different IP (that is bound to your computer) or port specify those options on the command line:
$ serve 4000 # a custom port $ serve 192.168.1.6 # a custom IP $ serve 192.168.1.6:4000 # a custom IP and port
For your convenience if the file “script/server” exists in the current directory the serve command will start that instead of launching a WEBrick server. You can specify the environment that you want to start the server with as an option on the command line:
$ serve production # start script/server in production mode
Serve presently does special processing for files with following extensions:
- textile
-
Evaluates the document as Textile (requires the Redcloth gem)
- markdown
-
Evaluates the document as Markdown (requires the Bluecloth gem)
- erb
-
Experimental support for ERB
- haml
-
Evaluates the document as Haml (requires the Haml gem)
- sass
-
Evaluates the document as Sass (requires the Haml gem)
-
Evaluates the document as if it is an e-mail message; the format is identical to a plain/text e-mail message’s source
- redirect
-
Redirects to the URL contained in the document
If you drop a file called view_helpers.rb in the root of a project, you can define custom helpers for your Haml and ERB views. Just declare the ViewHelpers module and begin declaring your helpers:
module ViewHelpers def custom_method "Request object: #{request.headers['user-agent']}" end end
It is recommended that you install serve via RubyGems:
$ sudo gem install serve
For more information, be sure to look through the documentation over at RubyForge:
Or visit the project page here:
All development now takes place on GitHub:
Serve is released under the MIT license and is copyright © 2007-2009 John W. Long and Adam I. Williams. A copy of the MIT license can be found in the LICENSE file.