pyserv: A simple bash function to use SimpleHTTPServer

Author:Ian Cordasco Origin:http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/blog/2012/11/one-liners.html Tags:bash, python, SimpleHTTPServer, screen,

The Final Code

pyserv() {
    if [[ -n $1 ]] ; then
        port="$1"
    else
        port="8000"
    fi

    old_dir="$(pwd)"

    if [[ -n $2 ]] ; then
        cd $2
    fi

    screen -dmS pyserv${port} python -m SimpleHTTPServer ${port}
    echo "http://localhost:${port}"
    echo "screen -r pyserv${port}"

    if ! [[ "$(pwd)" == $old_dir ]] ; then
        cd $old_dir
    fi
}

The Evolution

I have started to use a lot of tools that generate HTML for me and place them in pre-determined directories (e.g., coverage.py, sphinx, pelican). I can always use Firefox to navigate to those directories (file:///home/sigma/sandbox/project/_build/html/index.html) but that is annoying without a doubt. Sure I could bookmark that, but what if I move the project directory or change some settings? Wouldn’t it be nice to just type a regular URL into the location bar? One solution is to just use python’s SimpleHTTPServer module from the command-line like so

$ cd _build/html
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
^C
$ cd -

But that takes over the terminal and sending it to the background introduces ugly interlacing of output. So I then started putting it in a screen session

$ cd _build/html
$ screen -dmS pyserver python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
$ cd -

Using -dm allows me to immediately place the screen session in the background instead of attaching it to the terminal. The -S option allows me to give it a name so I can do screen -r pyserver instead of screen -ls; screen -r pidnumber. But constantly having to type out the screen command was beginning to annoy me so I wrote a function

pyserv() {
    if [[ -n $1 ]] ; then
        port="$1"
    else
        port="8000"
    fi

    screen -dmS pyserv${port} python -m SimpleHTTPServer ${port}
    echo "http://localhost:${port}"
    echo "screen -r pyserv${port}"
}

This allowed me to not even need to set up a port by providing a default and echoed the url and screen command to the terminal for me. I could then just type

$ cd _build/html ; pyserv ; cd -

But constantly having to type cd was beginning to annoy me as well and this resulted in the final iteration of this function.

pyserv() {
    if [[ -n $1 ]] ; then
        port="$1"
    else
        port="8000"
    fi

    old_dir="$(pwd)"

    if [[ -n $2 ]] ; then
        cd $2
    fi

    screen -dmS pyserv${port} python -m SimpleHTTPServer ${port}
    echo "http://localhost:${port}"
    echo "screen -r pyserv${port}"

    if ! [[ "$(pwd)" == $old_dir ]] ; then
        cd $old_dir
    fi
}

It has all the simplicity of the original function with more functionality:

• You can simply call pyserv in a directory and it will work
• It gives you the URL and screen alias.
• It will now change directories for you and serve the content from there, while placing you back in your original directory

A couple simple invocations are

$ pyserv 8080 _build/html
$ pyserv 9090 htmlcov/

By placing this in your .bashrc, .bash_profile or any other bash related file, (and then sourcing it . (filename)) you can have immediate access to this functionality.