Simple web server
Ever find you need to implement a web server or provide some web pages on a local network? Maybe you don't have an Apache server up and running or don't want to go to the trouble of configuring it. I've found this with Natural Docs documentation, where the tools will generate a bunch of .html files that you can read locally if you are on the machine where they are generated. Pygments also will generate html formatted files that you might want to serve. However, you might want to make them accessible to a small team. Here is a quick trick that can make this task very simple. Python ships with a basic HTTP server module. You can get it up and running, serving files from a given directory down with the following command:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
and that's all there is to it! The default port will be 8000, but you can provide a different port on the command line (just add the port number after the SimpleHTTPServer - any number above reserved range of 0-1024 will work. The server will be accessible to any machines that can see that port on the machine it is running on. The server won't handle a high load and isn't particular secure, so I wouldn't make it available to the general public. But if you need to serve some pages quickly and simply, to a small number of users within a private network, this can be a really fast way to get to that point. If and when the load becomes an issue, or security concerns are important, then a heavyweight server like Apache is a much better choice.
Once the server is up and running you access it via a web browser at http://machine_name:8000 File paths are all relative to the directory the server is running in. If there is an index.html in that directory, it will be loaded by default when you access the server at that URL.
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