Quickest and Easiest Way to Run a Local Web-Server

Key Takeaways

hey how's it going everybody in this video we're gonna take a look at how to quickly and easily spin up a local web server so if you're working on a website and you want to open that up in the browser sometimes it can be a pain to download programs like map or to do an entire set up of Apache or something like that it's kind of overkill if you just want to quickly glance at it I think the quickest and easiest way to do this is with pythons built in simple HTTP server now you will have to have Python installed but if you're on a Mac then that's gonna already be installed for you so let's take a look at how to do this first of all you want to open up your terminal so I have two terminal windows open up here and then you want to navigate to where your website is so for example I have a website here in the site's directory and then demos and then test site and if I look at the contents of this folder then the file that I want to take a look at is actually in this disk folder here so I'm going to CD into that directory and now if I do an LS in that folder then you can see here where we have the index.html file now to spin up a quick local web server and to view this file in the browser all you have to do is type in Python - M simple HTTP server and then you want to type in by default it's going to be port 8000 but I always type it in just to be sure so you type in the port number there so hit enter and you can see here in this terminal window it says serving HTTP on port 8000 so now if I go over here into my browser and type in localhost and then go to port 8000 and hit enter now you can see it opens up that test website within the browser so our local web server is running if you come over here into the terminal then you can see that it actually gives you some information - about what the web server is doing so you can see here that a get request on the route gave a 200 response and then you can see where it goes and requests the different CSS files and JavaScript files and things like that now you can minimize this terminal window here but be sure to keep it open because that is what's running your webserver so you don't want to close that down or else it'll close the web server down now the thing I like about this method is that it's so easy to spin up another server on and listen on another port so for example if I go to this other demo that I have called sample map if I CD into that directory and then LS you can see I have my index.html file here and so this other web server is still running here in the background so I could do Python - M HTTP HTTP server and I can do this on whatever port I want I'll just pick a random port at44 hit enter there so now you can see that it's serving on port 80 44 so if I go up here and go to localhost port 80 44 hit enter and now that website has is now running in the browser on that local web server listening on that port and now if you want to close down these web servers all you got to do is either close out of the terminal window or within the terminal window you can also hit control C you can see that it'll send a keyboard interrupt there and now if I try to reload that page then that server is no longer running and if I do it up here as well and try to reload this page and you can see that it's no longer listening on that port so you can see how a method like this is a lot faster than downloading a program like map or trying to set up a patchy or something like that just to quickly look at your website within the browser so that about does it for this video hopefully you guys found this quick tip useful but if you do have any questions and just ask in a comment section below be sure to subscribe for future videos and thank you guys for watching