Serve any directory locally on any port

For fast prototyping I create tiny projects consiting of some HTML files with JavaScript and CSS assets. Instead of opening them with the file protocol in the browser, I like them served over HTTP. I used to use php -S for this, but I do not want PHP on my machine, so I had to find an alternative. I wrote the alternative in Rust.

My first Rust project this is, and I named it msaada, Swahili for servant. And that is what it is: a small static file server written in Rust, based on actix-web and using clap.

$ msaada -p 3001 -d .

Imagine you’re prototyping a small webapp, usually I find myself creating an index.html and some .js and .css files: let’s get going with this canvas based idea! Or whatever – I mean, I like to have those served over HTTP instead of file://.

I remember PHP has php -S localhost:8000 for rapid development. And lately I used python’s python3 -m http.server 8000 which basically do the same. But I find the Python approach hard to remember, and I could write a shell script around that of course, but I saw it as a challange to write something myself.

Since I am lately playing around with Rust a little, I decided to write the server in Rust, based on actix-web. I wanted to create a command line application with some options so I imported clap also. With some support of AI code helpers I was able to write a simple web server. It will only serve static files and will initially look for an index.html when it receives a GET request.

This thing is of course a development tool, not meant for production. Usually I’d go with something like:

$ cd Projects
$ mkdir my-prototype
$ cd my-prototype
$ touch index.html
$ code .
$ msaada -p 3001 -d .
[2023-09-18T14:17:16Z INFO  msaada] starting HTTP server at http://localhost:3004

You can find the repo on Github. If you are interested in how to release Rust based artifacts to the Releases page, check out the workflows file in .github/workflows/release.yaml

The nice thing about clap is that it automatically creates help output, based on your configured command line arguments. A next step could be to add some attribution of myself, but I haven’t actually yet considered doing so.

$ msaada --help
Usage: msaada --port <port> --dir <directory>

Options:
  -p, --port <port>      The port number to use
  -d, --dir <directory>  The directory to serve from
  -h, --help             Print help