serve_here

These are some Python or Shell scripts for using Python's simple HTTP server class to serve some files.

Commands

serve_here

This eponymous script is a shell wrapper which tries Python 3, then Python 2, to simply invoke the stdlib HTTP server logic to serve the current directory.

As Python 2 falls away, the advantage of this over python -m http.server 8000 falls away too.

serve_accept_files

Anonymous insecure file upload, in Python3.

Provides a simple HTML form for allowing browsers to upload file content, and writes that content out into the current directory.

There is no authentication. There is minimal security filtering. It does not protect against existing file overwrite. This is not suitable for leaving running some place.

It is useful for quick and dirty HTTP file upload to your current working directory.

(Honestly, I forgot I had this until I copied the scripts into this new repo).

serve_here_more

A Python3 script to augment the serve_here model by subclassing http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler to add functionality. This is my day-to-day workhorse for when I want to expose files in my current directory to the local network.

• Advertises via Zeroconf if appropriate libraries are installed, so that the web-server appears in local-network lists in various mobile/tablet applications
• Better directory index listing which is compatible with mobile clients
• Reports URLs at start-up so you can see what clients should be pointed at
• Adds more MIME files to places to look
• Hard-codes a few MIME types
  • primarily for application/x-openvpn-profile and application/wasm
• If a requested file is missing, will look for compressed variants and serve them up with the MIME type as though it were found at the original filename, but with Content-Encoding applied.
  • Useful after zopfli main.wasm to shrink the size of a WASM binary served, but keeping all the MIME types correct.

History

All these are exports from my dot-personal git repository.

• serve_here was written in 2014 and has not been changed since. It just works.
• serve_accept_files was written in Feb 2017 and the only changes have been stylistic.
• serve_here_more is my normal workhorse; it was written in Apr 2017 and every few months gets various tweaks to make something else work.