sfs

An HTTP static file web server and proxy for serving files from a directory on macOS, Windows, or Linux.

Intended as a lightweight development tool for viewing static sites, e.g. documentation, blogs, diagnostic reports, HTML mockups, and prototypes.

Install

Download the zero-install binary to a directory on your PATH.

Usage

Usage: sfs [-l=<ip:port>] [-s] [-a [USER] PASS] [-d=<dir>] [-b] [-f=<format>] [-q] [-c] [-x=<url>]
Static File Server - https://github.com/schmich/sfs
Arguments:
  USER            Username for digest authentication
  PASS            Password for digest authentication
Options:
  -l, --listen    IP and port to listen on (default "127.0.0.1:8080")
  -s, --secure    Enable HTTPS with self-signed TLS certificate
  -a, --auth      Enable digest authentication
  -d, --dir       Directory to serve
  -b, --browser   Open web browser after server starts
  -f, --format    Log format: %i %t %m %u %s %b %a (default "%i - %m %u %s")
  -q, --quiet     Disable request logging
  -c, --cache     Allow cached responses
  -x, --proxy     Proxy requests to upstream server (implies -c)
  -v, --version   Show the version and exit

Examples

Start a web server for files in the current directory and launch the default browser:

sfs -b

Specify a port:

sfs -p 777

Allow external connections:

sfs -l 0.0.0.0

Serve files from another directory:

sfs -d ../bloop

Advanced

HTTPS with SSL/TLS

Serve content via HTTPS with a self-signed TLS certificate:

sfs -s

The TLS certificate is randomly generated at startup. Browsers will warn you about an insecure connection since the certificate is self-signed.

Digest Authentication

Enable HTTP digest authentication with a username and password:

sfs -a gordon p4ssw0rd

Username is optional. Password is required. If a username is not specified, any non-empty username will work. A password of - will prompt you for the password via stdin:

sfs -a -

Proxying Requests

sfs can act as an HTTP proxy. This is an altogether separate mode of operation from serving static files. This enables you to use sfs as a TLS-secured, digest-authenticated, logging frontend for another development server.

sfs -x localhost:4567

Logging

Change request logging format with -f:

sfs -f "%i - [%t] %m %u %s %b - %a"
# 127.0.0.1 - [21/Jul/2016:21:07:51 -0500] GET / 200 273 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36

Log format:

%i Remote IP address
%t Request timestamp
%m Request HTTP method
%u Request URL
%s Response status code
%b Response length (bytes)
%a Request user agent (User-Agent HTTP header)

Caching

By default, sfs modifies incoming and outgoing cache headers (Cache-Control, If-None-Match, If-Modified-Since, Last-Modified, ETag) to ensure no caching occurs. To allow caching, this can be disabled with:

sfs -c

sfs