Swerve

Quick and easy multithreaded file server for local development

About

A common misconception about swerve is that the name is a play on the word "serve", as in the purpose of a file server. Contrary to this, swerve actually stands for "Simple Werve" - the goal being to make it super simple to werve your files from anywhere on the filesystem.

While swerve does nothing innovative, the goal is to have a fast performing file server with minimal set up and tear down time, as well as minimal request time spent inside the server itself. Current features are limited to serving files, but the roadmap includes API mocking to make front end development even easier.

Installation

Prebuilt

1. Download the binary for your OS from the releases page
2. Put swerve somewhere in your $PATH, or modify your $PATH to inlcude the folder containing swerve
3. Do one of two things:
   1. Open up a command prompt and cd to the folder containing your files and run swerve

      cd "$HOME/projects/my_awesome_site"
      swerve
      

   2. Open up a command prompt and run swerve, specifying your target directory

      swerve -d "$HOME/projects/my_awesome_site"
      

From source

To build and install swerve from source, you will need rustc 1.22.0-nightly or later as well as the Cargo package manager

1. In a command prompt, run cargo install swerve

This will build a copy of swerve on your local machine in case there isn't a binary built for your platform. A little bit anticlimactic, but pretty simple.

Usage

You can print out the usage text at any time by running swerve -h or swerve --help. The currently supported options are:

-h, --help | | Print out the help text | -d, --dir | path; string | Use the target directory as the root for serving files | File paths are jailed, and will not be able to escape the root directory. Defaults to the directory in which the swerve command was run -p, --port | port; unsigned int | Run the server listening on the given port | Defaults to 8200 -a, --address | address; string | Bind the server to this network address, allowing remote connections | Defaults to localhost, preventing remote connections -t, --threads | thread count; unsigned int | Create this number of threads in the thread pool, to use for serving files concurrently | Defaults to 32. Performance may be improved on lower end machines by decreasing the number of worker threads -q, --quiet | | Don't print anything to stdout | Useful if you're spawning swerve from another process and need to monitor stdout --no-index | | Don't attempt to serve an index.html file from a directory path | By default, swerve will treat directories as requests for an index.html file. e.g. /foo/bar is treated as /foo/bar/index.html