Invoke Python SimpleHTTPServer from command line with no cache option

Question

On Windows 7, I am using the command line

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888

to invoke a simple web server to serve files from a directory, f

Answer 1

Perhaps this may work. Save the following to a file:

serveit.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import SimpleHTTPServer

class MyHTTPRequestHandler(SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
    def end_headers(self):
        self.send_my_headers()
        SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.end_headers(self)

    def send_my_headers(self):
        self.send_header("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")
        self.send_header("Pragma", "no-cache")
        self.send_header("Expires", "0")


if __name__ == '__main__':
    SimpleHTTPServer.test(HandlerClass=MyHTTPRequestHandler)

then run it using

python serveit.py 8000

to serve the current directory on port 8000. This was totally pulled from this gist, and seems to work great!

NOTE: If you're just looking to run a local webserver to serve static content, you may be interested in a precanned node solution to do this => http-server, which I've been using and seems to work great.

Also if you're on a mac, if you run this as root you can run it on port 80 or 443! For example

sudo python serveit.py 80

should allow you to run it and access it in your browser at http://localhost