KB ID 0001157 

Problem

I was clearing out some old emails yesterday, and saw one my colleague Steve had sent me. It was info on how to fire up a quick web server on your mac. It wasn’t until I took a look at it, I realised how handy it was.

After some reading, I found that it was not only possible on a mac, but on other flavours of Linux as well, (as long as they support ‘python’ and have it loaded).

WHAT USE IS THAT? What if you want to send a large file to a colleague? Yes you could use USB drives or dropbox, but executing one command is a lot quicker. Or what if you are on a site where everything is locked down, and only a few ports are open but you need to get a file somewhere, do a quick nmap scan and you can download your files over a different port.

Solution

First open a terminal window, then navigate to the folder you want to ‘serve’. Then simply execute the following command;

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Note: Where TCP port 8080 is the port you want to use.
Then simply browse to https://{Your-IP-Address}:8080

BE AWARE: You shouldn’t see a problem if you use any port ABOVE 1024, however if you chose a lower port, you may see ‘Permission Denied’ errors.

To address that ‘sudo’ the command, (unless you are logged into Linux as root!)

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

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