Tech Tip: Really Simple HTTP Server with Python

Sep 22, 2009  By 

 in

If you need a quick web server running and you don't want to mess

with setting up apache or something similar, then can help.

Python comes with a simple builtin HTTP server.

With the help of this little HTTP server you can turn any directory in

your system into your web server directory.

The only thing you need to have installed is Python.

Practically speaking this is very useful to share files inside

your local network. Implementing this tiny but hugely useful HTTP

server is very simple, its just a single line command.

Assume that I would like to share the directory /home/hisam and my IP

address is 192.168.1.2

Open up a terminal and type:

$ cd /home/somedir$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

That's it!

Now your http server will start in port 8000. You will get the message:

Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...

Now open a browser and type the following address:

http://192.168.1.2:8000

You can also access it via:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

If the directory has a file named index.html, that file will be

served as the initial file. If there is no index.html, then

the files in the directory will be listed.

If you wish to change the port that's used start the program via:

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

If you want to only serve on localhost you'll need to write

a custom Python program such as:

import sysimport BaseHTTPServerfrom SimpleHTTPServer import SimpleHTTPRequestHandlerHandlerClass = SimpleHTTPRequestHandlerServerClass  = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServerProtocol     = "HTTP/1.0"if sys.argv[1:]:    port = int(sys.argv[1])else:    port = 8000server_address = ('127.0.0.1', port)HandlerClass.protocol_version = Protocolhttpd = ServerClass(server_address, HandlerClass)sa = httpd.socket.getsockname()print "Serving HTTP on", sa[0], "port", sa[1], "..."httpd.serve_forever()

Note also that this should also work on Windows or .