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local-web-server

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 of lws bundled with a "starter pack" of useful middleware.

Synopsis

This package installs the ws command-line tool (take a look at the usage guide).

Static web site

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

$ ws
Listening 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 and stats.

Single Page Application

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 return 404 Not Found as a file at that location does not exist. However, by marking index.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.

URL rewriting and proxied requests

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/ to https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/. For example, a request for /posts/1 would be proxied to https://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.

HTTPS and HTTP2

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 --http2
Listening at https://mba4.local:8000, https://127.0.0.1:8000, https://192.168.0.200:8000

Built-in middleware stack

If you do not 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.

Name	Description
↓ Basic Auth	Password-protect a server using Basic Authentication
↓ Body Parser	Parses the request body, making ctx.request.body available to downstream middleware.
↓ Request Monitor	Feeds traffic information to the --verbose output.
↓ Log	Outputs an access log or stats view to the console.
↓ Cors	Support for setting Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) headers
↓ Json	Pretty-prints JSON responses.
↓ Rewrite	URL Rewriting. Use to re-route requests to local or remote destinations.
↓ Blacklist	Forbid access to sensitive or private resources
↓ Conditional Get	Support for HTTP Conditional requests.
↓ Mime	Customise the mime-type returned with any static resource.
↓ Compress	Compress responses using gzip.
↓ SPA	Support for Single Page Applications.
↓ Static	Serves static files.
↓ Index	Serves directory listings.

Further Documentation

See the wiki for plenty more documentation and tutorials.

Install

$ npm install -g local-web-server

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© 2013-24 Lloyd Brookes <[email protected]>. Documented by jsdoc-to-markdown.