2021-12-21

Serve Local Folder As Website

Using Docker
- httpd2 (Apache Server)
- thttpd
Traditional web servers.
- Nginx
- Apache
Using Python
Using NPM

Hot ways to serve your local folder as simple website

Using Docker

httpd2 (Apache Server)

Run :

docker run --rm --name static-web-server -dit \
-v /home/www/html:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ \
-p 80:80 \
httpd:2.4

If you want only share a single file, choose -v /home/www/html/file.zip:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/download.zip

Now, you can open web server on http://localhost port 80

thttpd

This is a minimal (approx. 1MB) image that runs thttpd (a web server) on port 80. Without any additional configuration it will serve out a single sample page

If you want to serve your own static content with this image, you can use it like this:

docker run -v /path/to/my/content:/content larsks/thttpd -d /content

Text extracted from here

Traditional web servers.

Nginx

Download zip server

$ curl http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.20.1.zip -o nginx.zip

Unzip the zip

$ unzip nginx.zip -d ./server/ ; mv server/nginx-1.20.1 server/html
$ tree -L 2 ser
.
├── conf
│   ├── fastcgi.conf
│   ├── fastcgi_params
│   ├── koi-utf
│   ├── koi-win
│   ├── mime.types
│   ├── nginx.conf
│   ├── scgi_params
│   ├── uwsgi_params
│   └── win-utf
├── contrib
│   ├── README
│   ├── geo2nginx.pl
│   ├── unicode2nginx
│   └── vim
├── docs
│   ├── CHANGES
│   ├── CHANGES.ru
│   ├── LICENSE
│   ├── OpenSSL.LICENSE
│   ├── PCRE.LICENCE
│   ├── README
│   └── zlib.LICENSE
├── html
│   ├── 404.html
│   ├── 50x.html
│   ├── index.html
├── logs
├── nginx.exe
└── temp

2 directories, 18 files

Edit conf/nginx.conf and edit port and add custom configuration

$ sed '/listen\s+([0-9]+)/s/80/9393/' conf/nginx.conf

...
 server {
        listen       9393;
        server_name  localhost;

        charset utf-8;

        # access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
...
...

Apache

If you have apache installed locally, follow next steps to enable a new site configuration.

First, make directory for a new subdomain or domain under the same directory as the original website or create one if not exists.

Examples:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/demo-site/ (would become demo.example.com)
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example2.com/

Grant permission to the new directory:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/test.com/

Modify permissions to ensure that read access is permitted:

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www

Copy the default Virtual Host and Customize for Second(sub/new) Domain clone existing 000-default.conf under /etc/apache2/sites-available/

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-demo.conf

IMPORTANT:: The original or the first Virtual Host must be modifed as below

E.g. if 000-joomla.conf is the first Virtual Host, then:

    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com

NOTE: forgetting to do the step above will cause database or cache conflict.

E.g. virtualhost for demo.example.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
	<Directory /var/www/demo>
			Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
			AllowOverride All
			Order allow,deny
			allow from all
	</Directory>
	ServerName demo.example.com
	ServerAlias www.demo.example.com
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	DocumentRoot /var/www/demo
	...
</VirtualHost>

after that, enable the New Virtual Host Files as below:

E.g:

sudo a2ensite example.com.conf
sudo a2ensite 000-demo.conf

then, reload apache

sudo service apache2 reload

If you are running webserver on localhost then you need to redirect you /etc/hosts for

# /etc/hosts
0.0.1 github.com
0.0.1 example.com
0.0.1 www.example.com

if you are running webserver on localhost on windows machine, then edit hosts files as this link

Using Python

If you have python installed you can simply run this commans to expose files as downloadable

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

You can see how to use it in the exmaple follow next link –» Here «–

Using NPM

install http-serve from shell

$ npm install --global http-server

usage

$  http-server [path] [options]

[path] defaults to ./public if the folder exists, and ./ otherwise.

Now you can visit http://localhost:8080 to view your server

Note: Caching is on by default. Add -c-1 as an option to disable caching.