“Ad-hoc webserver” for static files on UNIX/MacOSX?

Question

Is there such a thing as a tiny little webserver that I can invoke from the command line that just fetches files from the local filesystem and serves them via HTTP on specific p

Answer 1

Python3 can serve the current directory via HTTP using http.server:

$ python3 -m http.server

Where

• python3 the current version of python
• -m stands for module
• http the http package
• http.server the server module (of the http package)

Per default, http.server listens on port 8000, but you can specify another like this:

$ python3 -m http.server 8080