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static-server: an HTTP server in Go for static content

September 16, 2023 at 06:20 Tags Go , Network Programming , Software
& Tools

I put together a simple static file server in Go - useful for local
testing of web applications. Check it out at https://github.com/
eliben/static-server

If you have Go installed on your machine, you don't have to download
anything else; you can run:

$ go run github.com/eliben/static-server@latest

And it will start serving the current directory! Run it with -help
for usage information. No configuration files needed - the default is
useful and you can adjust it to your needs using command-line flags.

Why

When developing web applications locally, for basic test cases we can
open an HTML file directly in the browser (using file:/// scheme).
However, this is sometimes insufficient, and in several scenarios
it's necessary to properly serve the HTML (along with its JS and
CSS). Some cases where I encountered this are web applications that
use at least one of:

  * Web workers
  * Web sockets
  * WASM
  * Separate API servers, requiring CORS

In the past, when I was more active in the Python ecosystem, I used
python -m SimpleHTTPServer <port> quite a bit. While it's nice, it
has some issues too: it's not very configurable, and it requires
Python to be installed.

Another option I've used is http-server from the Node.js ecosystem;
in fact, it has served as the inspiration for static-server. You can
run it with npx without installing, and it's also configurable
through command-line flags, without requiring configuration files.

But we can't expect all Go developers to have npm or npx installed.
Moreover, sometimes you want to tweak the server a bit and digging in
JavaScript is not any Go programmer's idea of a good time. Like many
tools in that ecosystem, this Node.js-based HTTP server is all in on
dependencies - with 13 of them, it's not easy to understand or modify
its code; much of it is split across multiple helper packages, and
making changes can be tricky.

How

Spinning up a static file server in Go is very easy - I wrote a whole
blog post about the possibilities at some point. The simplest static
server to serve the current working directory is just:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
  port := ":8080"
  handler := http.FileServer(http.Dir("."))
  http.ListenAndServe(port, handler)
}

Having found myself plopping a small server.go with these contents in
too many web projects, I decided enough was enough. Thus
static-server was born.

static-server is simple, yet versatile. It will do the right thing by
default, with no flags whatsoever. But you can also use flags to
configure a few aspects, e.g.: the port it serves on, CORS support,
serving via TLS, control how logging is done.

static-server is hackable and easy to understand. All the code is in
a single file (with fewer than 200 lines of code, including comments
and handling flags) and there are no dependencies (except one package
that is only used for testing).

I find static-server very useful, and I hope others will too. If you
run into any problems or have questions, open a GitHub issue or send
me an email.

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(c) 2003-2023 Eli Bendersky

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