Serve

Serve is a small command-line utility to serve files via localhost.

Features

• Local HTTP server (always http://127.0.0.1:3000)
• Specified directory path (as a command line argument)
• File server (all files from within this directory path)
• Request path mapping (e.g. GET /app.js -> app.js)
• Index file mapping (e.g. GET /some-path/ maps to the file some-path/index.html)
• File extension-based content-type header

Optional features

These features are only enabled if Serve is built with the corresponding flag enabled.

• -Dadditional_redirect - Redirect file requests where instead a directory exists on the filesystem to a directory request (e.g. GET /some-path -> GET /some-path/)

Supported Zig version

Serve is tested with Zig 0.14.0. Your mileage may vary on other versions. If you encounter an issue, patches are encouraged.

Usage

At the moment, there are no published binaries. If you want to use Serve, you'll need to obtain a copy of the Zig compiler and build it yourself.

To build the project, simply clone the repository, enter the directory, then build the project with:

zig build

The program will be available in your current directory at zig-out/bin/serve. Feel free to copy this somewhere accessible via your PATH.

Alternatively, you can build an optimized executable by building in release mode:

# build in release mode
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe
# or, build a release binary optimized for size
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSmall

Alternatives

Serve is meant to be used as a local development tool to serve files via localhost only. If you are looking for a static server to run on your production system, this is not it. For production, consider something like nginx.

An alternative you could consider is the Python 3 built-in module http.server.

Contributions

Patches are welcome.

Acknowledgements

• Zig - This project is written in Zig
• http.zig - This project is a thin wrapper around http.zig