This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Andrew Montgomery. Original Post: Static site development Feed Title: Dark Liquid - Ruby Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DarkLiquid-Ruby Feed Description: Ruby and Rails related ramblings by Andrew Montgomery Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Andrew Montgomery Latest Posts From Dark Liquid - Ruby

When developing a static site, or editing an existing one, its a bitch to try and remember things like relative and absolute paths, etc etc. I didn���t want to have to mess with that and I certainly didn���t want the hassle of setting up apache or lighty just to serve files from the directory I had mirrored the site.

So, Ruby to the rescue! 2 minutes later and I had this serving my files for me:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'webrick'
include WEBrick

def webserve(port, directory)
  server = HTTPServer.new(
    :Port            => port,
    :DocumentRoot    => directory
  )
  trap("INT"){ server.shutdown }
  server.start
end

port = ARGV[0] || 3000
directory = ARGV[1] || Dir::pwd
webserve(port, directory)

Just run it in the directory that has your files in, or call it like:

webserver 3000 /path/to/my/files

and voila, instant server.

I don���t know how people live without this stuff.