Simple webserver for Windows

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Hrafnkell

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Dec 29, 2010, 4:39:36 PM12/29/10
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Does anyone have suggestions for a simple webserver to use on windows
together with pagekite?

I've been experimenting with Apache but I feel thats a bit too much
for simple use. Its hard to configure for non-techies.

I found this list of free webservers. Most of them seem to be
available on windows.

http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/web-server-software.shtml

HFS looks interesting. Anyone tried that?

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson

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Dec 29, 2010, 9:11:04 PM12/29/10
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Már was asking the same earlier today, I had no good answer for him.

All I've tried so far is XAMPP: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

That is a full Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl/... stack, in easily installable form. But quite overkill for most things.
--
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/

Stefán Freyr Stefánsson

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Dec 29, 2010, 9:24:10 PM12/29/10
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Since there's already an overkill option mentioned here, here's an "underkill":

Python 2.x:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Python 3.x:
python -m http.server 8000

This serves up the contents of the directory you started it in.

No bells nor whistles... probably slow as f**k and complimentary security holes the size of goatse... but convenient since you must already have python installed for pagekite.

Just my 2 cents.

Stefan

On Dec 30, 2010 2:11 AM, "Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson" <b...@pagekite.net> wrote:

Már

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Dec 30, 2010, 8:49:48 AM12/30/10
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I like the underkill! Exactly what I needed.

This needs to go into the quickstart guide.

--
Már

Már

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Dec 30, 2010, 9:39:52 AM12/30/10
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> This needs to go into the quickstart guide.

Come to think of it, this might even be an awesome built-in optional
switch for pagekite.py...

Just four simple steps:

1) download pagekite.cfg (or pagekite.rc) place it in your home folder
2) download pagekite.py
3) cd into a folder you want to publish
4) type 'pagekite.py -quickserve'

...and you have a simple website running!

--
Már

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson

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Dec 30, 2010, 9:49:11 AM12/30/10
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Yeah, Hrafnkell and I had a nice discussion earlier about what built-in PageKite web-servers could do. We quickly got carried away into the land of video streaming and transcoding and...

But something will definitely be built-in at some point. Just have to decide what! Pagekite.py is already including the BaseHTTPServer for it's own HTTP Console, making it do other useful stuff would not be a huge stretch.

I've actually built a few of the PageKite.net back-end RPC systems in exactly this way, as it appeals to the sysadmin in me to just have static dns name for a service component, but then run it on whichever machine makes sense at a given time, letting PageKite handle the routing. But I digress...

Már

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Dec 31, 2010, 4:36:48 AM12/31/10
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> what! Pagekite.py is already including the BaseHTTPServer for it's own HTTP
> Console, making it do other useful stuff would not be a huge stretch.

BTW, I'm not suggesting Pagekite should include everything (and the
kitchen sink).

I just think a "quickserve" option (possibly with optional
pathToWebroot and portNumber parameters) would A) improve the demo-
ability of Pagekite, B) lower the barrier of entry for lazy/less hard-
core users, and C) make casual temporary publishing a whole lot easier

--
Már

Hrafnkell

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Dec 31, 2010, 12:10:42 PM12/31/10
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Did some experiments with the Python SimpleHTTPServer on Win7.

Used Picasa to create a HTML photo album. Ran python -m
SimpleHTTPServer in the folder where the html output was and made
public using pagekite. Very simple, worked well. Easy photo album
publication.

Encoded a video as Ogg Theora and created a HTML file to view it using
both the HTML5 video tag and the Cortado java applet. Both caused
SimpleHTTPServer to throw an execption when the video viewer (html5 in
chrome/firefox and cortado) started to fetch the video file. Probably
range request or something that the SimpleHTTPServer doesn't support.

SimpleHTTPServer is really simple, doesn't seem to handle anything but
small static files and simple GET requests.
Fine for some jobs, not other.

Björn Swift

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Dec 31, 2010, 12:57:12 PM12/31/10
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You might be interested in other Python based web servers. There are
several floating about. I make a quick summary a couple of years ago,
and found that Paste (http://pythonpaste.org/) was fairly good. It is
(or was, at least) relatively well contained, and can comfortably be
triggered/run from another module. Haven't done any tests to see
whether they support range requests, if anyone is interested I can
test that tomorrow.

Others might include Twisted, web.py etc. However, most of these are
focused on more dynamic content, but do allow serving static content
as a module. So, while they might be an overkill in some sense, they
are likely easier to install than Apache.

Cheers,
Björn Swift

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