miniserve - a CLI tool to serve files and dirs over HTTP

For when you really just want to serve some files over HTTP right now!

miniserve is a small, self-contained cross-platform CLI tool that allows you to just grab the binary and serve some file(s) via HTTP. Sometimes this is just a more practical and quick way than doing things properly.

How to use

Serve a directory:

miniserve linux-distro-collection/

Serve a single file:

miniserve linux-distro.iso

Require username/password:

miniserve --auth joe:123 unreleased-linux-distros/

Features

• Easy to use
• Just works: Correct MIME types handling out of the box
• Single binary drop-in with no extra dependencies required
• Authentication support with username and password
• Mega fast and highly parallel (thanks to Rust and Actix)

How to install

On Linux: Download miniserve-linux from the releases page and run

chmod +x miniserve-linux
./miniserve-linux

On OSX: Download miniserve-osx from the releases page and run

chmod +x miniserve-osx
./miniserve-osx

On Windows: Download miniserve-win.exe from the releases page and run

miniserve-win.exe

With Cargo: If you have a somewhat recent version of Rust and Cargo installed, you can run

cargo install miniserve
miniserve

Why use this over alternatives?

• darkhttpd: Not easily available on Windows and it's not as easy as download and go.
• Python built-in webserver: Need to have Python installed, it's low performance, and also doesn't do correct MIME type handling in some cases.
• netcat: Not as convenient to use and sending directories is somewhat involved.

Releasing

This is mostly a note for me on how to release this thing:

• Update version in Cargo.toml.
• git commit and git tag -s, git push.
• cargo publish
• Releases will automatically be deployed by Travis.
• Update AUR package.