Static site development

When developing a static site, or editing an existing one, its a bitch to try and remember things like relative and absolute paths, etc etc. I didn’t want to have to mess with that and I certainly didn’t want the hassle of setting up apache or lighty just to serve files from the directory I had mirrored the site.

So, Ruby to the rescue! 2 minutes later and I had this serving my files for me:

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<code class='ruby'>#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'webrick'
include WEBrick
def webserve(port, directory)
server = HTTPServer.new(
:Port => port,
:DocumentRoot => directory
)
trap("INT"){ server.shutdown }
server.start
end
port = ARGV[0] || 3000
directory = ARGV[1] || Dir::pwd
webserve(port, directory)</code>

Just run it in the directory that has your files in, or call it like:

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<code>webserver 3000 /path/to/my/files
</code>

and voila, instant server.

I don’t know how people live without this stuff.