This tool allows you to package a bunch of files (HTML, CSS…) and a small Python module (with no external dependencies) in a single file application that, once executed, will serve such files via HTTP.
This can be useful, for example, if you designed a static web site you want to send a preview of to a customer: with this tool you'll be able to send him a single file that, once executed, will locally serve the site.
Take for example the example-documentroot directory in this repository that contains a single-page web site made of an HTML and a CSS file. If you run
./make_zerve example-documentroot
(from the direcotry containng this README.md file), you will obtain an
executable file named zerve; now every time that you run
./zerve
(wherever such file has been moved), a web browser will open pointing to
http://localhost:8000/, corresonding to the single-page web site contained in
example-documentroot; you can stop the server simply
pressing ctrl-C.
The packaged zerve application is also able to serve files from the local
filesystem; this can be useful, for example, in case you have a (client side,
static) web application depending on a large set of "fixed" files plus a few
data, or configuration, files that you want to be able to specify at runtime.
Running
./zerve an/url/resource.html:some/directory/file.html
will serve (beside the file packaged my make_zerve) the
some/directory/file.html file at URL
http://localhost:8000/an/url/resource.html
You can specify more than one file with the same syntax, and if you omit the
an/url/resource.html: part the file path will be used as the URL path, so for
example ./zerve file.html will serve file.html file at
http://localhost:8000/file.html URL. Observe that the content of the specified
files is cached at run, so if you modify the file on the filesystem, you'll
need to re-run zerve to update the served content.
Use ./zerve -h to dicover how to change the port the server listens to, or
how to avoid opening a web browser at every run.