This documentation is a work in progress

local-web-server

The modular web server for productive full-stack development.

Use this tool to:

• Build fast, modern web applications using any tech, framework or architecture.
• Prototype back-end services (RESTful HTTP API, Microservice, websocket server etc.)

Essentially, local-web-server is the lws command-line web server with a basic middleware stack built in offering the following typical features:

• Static file serving
• Single Page Application support
• Response mocking
• Configurable access log
• URL Rewriting, to local or remote destinations
• Request body parsing
• Route blacklisting
• HTTP Conditional Request support (cacheing)
• MIME-type customisation
• Gzip response compression
• Directory listing support

Synopsis

This package installs the ws command-line tool. The most simple use case is to run ws without any arguments - this will host the current directory as a static web site.

$ ws
Serving at http://mbp.local:8000, http://127.0.0.1:8000, http://192.168.0.100:8000

Another common use case is to proxy certain requests to remote servers (e.g. you'd like to use data from a different environment). For example, the following command would proxy http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/users/1 to https://internal-service.local/api/users/1:

$ ws --rewrite '/api/* -> https://internal-service.local/api/$1`
Serving at http://mbp.local:8000, http://127.0.0.1:8000, http://192.168.0.100:8000

Imagine the network is down or you're working offline, proxied requests to https://internal-service.local/api/users/1 would fail. In this case, you could use Mock Responses to fill the gap. Define the mock responses in a module.

const users = [
  { "id": 1, "name": "Lloyd", "age": 40, "nationality": "English" },
  { "id": 2, "name": "Mona", "age": 34, "nationality": "Palestinian" },
  { "id": 3, "name": "Francesco", "age": 24, "nationality": "Italian" }
]

/* response mocks for /users */
module.exports = [
  {
    route: '/users',
    responses: [
      /* Respond with 400 Bad Request for PUT and DELETE requests (inappropriate on a collection) */
      { request: { method: 'PUT' }, response: { status: 400 } },
      { request: { method: 'DELETE' }, response: { status: 400 } },
      {
        /* for GET requests return the collection */
        request: { method: 'GET' },
        response: { type: 'application/json', body: users }
      },
      {
        /* for POST requests, create a new user and return its location */
        request: { method: 'POST' },
        response: function (ctx) {
          const newUser = ctx.request.body
          users.push(newUser)
          ctx.status = 201
          ctx.response.set('Location', `/users/${users.length}`)
        }
      }
    ]
  }
]

Advanced Usage

Being modular and extensible, features can be added or removed from ws in the shape of Middleware, ServerFactory or View modules. See the wiki for full documentation and tutorials.

Install

Requires node v7.6 or higher. Install the previous release for node >= v4.0.0.

$ npm install -g local-web-server@next

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© 2013-17 Lloyd Brookes 75pound@gmail.com. Documented by jsdoc-to-markdown.