srv: minimalist alternative to python -m http.server

srv

minimalist http(s) server and file browser.

i wrote this to substitute python3 -m http.server . here are the differences:

• shows file size
• does not follow symlinks
  • by extension, refuses access to all irregular files
• serves some automatically detected Content-Type mimetypes for browser previews, as opposed to plain octet-stream
  • note that this is dependent on go's DetectContentType
• by default, tells the client to NOT cache responses
• TLS support
• is nearly 40x faster (see, mostly in part due to golang and some of my own choices

you could achieve some of these bullet points (e.g. TLS support, response caching) by wrapping python HTTPServer and only using python stdlib, but that hurts from a default usability perspective.

download

cross-platform static executables can be found here .

usage

Simply srv . Defaults are -p 8000 -b 127.0.0.1 -d .

TLS and HTTP/2 are enabled if you pass -c certfile -k keyfile .

self-signed certs:

openssl req -nodes -new -x509 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -subj "/"

or better, locally trusted certs with mkcert :

mkcert -install
mkcert -key-file key.pem -cert-file cert.pem -ecdsa 127.0.0.1

benchmarks

Python 3.7.3 python3 -m http.server &>/dev/null

$ ./bench
Running 5s test @ http://127.0.0.1:8000
  8 threads and 8 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency    12.52ms    2.82ms  20.32ms   81.22%
    Req/Sec    79.17     41.95     0.91k    99.75%
  3174 requests in 5.10s, 2.56MB read
Requests/sec:    622.41
Transfer/sec:    513.67KB
wrk is done. response code counts:
200     3174

...not to mention the spew of BrokenPipeError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe towards the end.

srv 0.2 (fully static linux-amd64 build, go1.13.5) srv -q

$ ./bench
Running 5s test @ http://127.0.0.1:8000
  8 threads and 8 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency   648.80us    1.32ms  18.44ms   93.26%
    Req/Sec     2.96k   489.96     4.82k    72.59%
  119382 requests in 5.10s, 99.62MB read
Requests/sec:  23409.69
Transfer/sec:     19.53MB
wrk is done. response code counts:
200     119382