Requires node v4.0.0 or higher. Install the previous release for older node support.

local-web-server

At its core, local-web-server is an application shell for building a specialised command-line web server to support productive Web Platform engineers. When combined with built-in and custom features it's in intended to by a powerful tool in helping build and debug Web applications. It comes bundled with a middleware stack covering common requirements but any arbitrary stack can be specified from the command line or config.

Being an npm module, it is trivial is bundle and distribute/deploy with your web application.

Typically used for building:

• Simple static site
• Single Page Application
  • Works well with React, Angular or vanilla JS.

Backend scenarios covered:

• Existing API
• Mock API
• Websocket server

Server options

• HTTP or HTTPS server
  • HTTPS is strictly required by some modern techs (ServiceWorker, Media Capture and Streams etc.)
• Configurable middleware stack
  • Use any combination of built-in and custom middleware
  • specify options (for command line or config)
  • Accepts Koa v1 or 2 middleware

Built-in Middleware stack

• Rewrite routes to local or remote resources
• Efficient, predictable, entity-tag-powered conditional request handling (no need to 'Disable Cache' in DevTools, slowing page-load down)
• Configurable log output, compatible with Goaccess, Logstalgia and glTail
• Proxy server
  • Map local routes to remote servers. Removes CORS pain when consuming remote services.
• Back-end service mocking
  • Prototype a web service, microservice, REST API etc.
  • Mocks are defined with config (static), or code (dynamic).
• CORS-friendly, all origins allowed by default.

Personalised stack

Synopsis

local-web-server is a command-line tool. To serve the current directory, run ws.

$ ws --help

local-web-server

  A simple web-server for productive front-end development.

Synopsis

  $ ws [--verbose] [] []
  $ ws --config
  $ ws --help

Server

  -p, --port number   Web server port.
  --key file          SSL key. Supply along with --cert to launch a https server.
  --cert file         SSL cert. Supply along with --key to launch a https server.
  --https             Enable HTTPS using a built-in key and cert, registered to the domain
                      127.0.0.1.

Middleware

  -r, --rewrite expression ...   A list of URL rewrite rules. For each rule, separate the 'from' and 'to'
                                 routes with '->'. Whitespace surrounded the routes is ignored. E.g. '/from ->
                                 /to'.
  -b, --forbid path ...          A list of forbidden routes.
  -n, --no-cache                 Disable etag-based caching -forces loading from disk each request.
  -c, --compress                 Serve gzip-compressed resources, where applicable.
  -f, --log.format string        If a format is supplied an access log is written to stdout. If not, a dynamic
                                 statistics view is displayed. Use a preset ('none', 'dev','combined',
                                 'short', 'tiny' or 'logstalgia') or supply a custom format (e.g. ':method ->
                                 :url').
  -s, --spa file                 Path to a Single Page App, e.g. app.html.
  -d, --directory path           Root directory, defaults to the current directory.

Misc

  -h, --help    Print these usage instructions.
  --config      Print the stored config.

  Project home: https://github.com/75lb/local-web-server

Install

$ npm install -g local-web-server

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© 2013-16 Lloyd Brookes 75pound@gmail.com. Documented by jsdoc-to-markdown.