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A lean, modular web server for rapid full-stack development.

• Supports HTTP, HTTPS and HTTP2.
• Small and 100% personalisable. Load and use only the behaviour required by your project.
• Attach a custom view to personalise how activity is visualised.
• Programmatic and command-line interfaces.

Use this tool to:

• Build any type of front-end web application (static, dynamic, Single Page App, Progessive Web App, React etc).
• Prototype a back-end service (REST API, microservice, websocket, Server Sent Events service etc).
• Monitor activity, analyse performance, experiment with caching strategy etc.

Local-web-server is a distribution oflws bundled with a "starter pack" of useful middleware.

This package installs thews command-line tool (take a look at theusage guide).

Runningws without any arguments will host the current directory as a static web site. Navigating to the server will render a directory listing or yourindex.html, if that file exists.

$ wsListening on http://mbp.local:8000, http://127.0.0.1:8000, http://192.168.0.100:8000

Static files tutorial.

This clip demonstrates static hosting plus a couple of log output formats -dev andstats.

Serving a Single Page Application (an app with client-side routing, e.g. a React or Angular app) is as trivial as specifying the name of your single page:

$ ws --spa index.html

With a static site, requests for typical SPA paths (e.g./user/1,/login) would return404 Not Found as a file at that location does not exist. However, by markingindex.html as the SPA you create this rule:

If a static file is requested (e.g./css/style.css) then serve it, if not (e.g./login) then serve the specified SPA and handle the route client-side.

SPA tutorial.

Another common use case is to forward certain requests to a remote server.

The following command proxies blog post requests from any path beginning with/posts/ tohttps://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/. For example, a request for/posts/1 would be proxied tohttps://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1.

$ ws --rewrite'/posts/(.*) -> https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/$1'

Rewrite tutorial.

This clip demonstrates the above plus use of--static.extensions to specify a default file extension and--verbose to monitor activity.

For HTTPS or HTTP2, pass the--https or--http2 flags respectively.See the wiki for further configuration options and a guide on how to get the "green padlock" in your browser.

$ ws --http2Listening at https://mba4.local:8000, https://127.0.0.1:8000, https://192.168.0.200:8000

If you donot supply a custom middleware stack via the--stack option the following default stack will be used. It's designed to cover most typical web development scenarios.

See the wiki for plenty more documentation and tutorials.

$ npm install -g local-web-server

© 2013-25 Lloyd Brookes <opensource@75lb.com>. Documented byjsdoc-to-markdown.