Serve Static Files with Minimum Effort

March 2, 2020

Suppose you have a group of files that you want to share with a group of people. In my case, I had some experimental results and analysis that I wanted to share. I couldn’t put up these files on a public platform because of security reasons, so I needed some method of access control. I suppose the naïve way would be to send everyone an email, but I wanted to keep updating some files as I continues the analysis, so emails would have been too mesy to deal with.

I thought a simple HTTP server should serve the purpose, but I didn’t want to spend too much time writing the code for authentication and SSL.

Then, I found http-server, which is command line http server. Perfect!

Steps -

  1. Install node.js, npm and npx 
    sudo apt install nodejs nodejs-dev node-gyp libssl1.0-dev npm
  2. Install http-server 
    sudo npm install --global http-server
  3. Generate SSL files as mentioned in the README 
    openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -new -nodes -x509 -days 3650 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem
  4. Navigate to the folder with the static files you want to serve 
    npx http-server --username user --password pass -S -C cert.pem -K key.pem --no-dotfiles --log-ip

That’s it!

Serve Static Files with Minimum Effort - March 2, 2020 - Tanmayee Narendra