Serve allows you to pick any directory on your machine, and expose its contents as a static file server. This means the contents of this directory will then be accessible by any other machine on your local network, or even anyone else on the internet if you decide to port forward the host system.

serve [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

The port used for connections depends on the provided flags. The default port is 5000

• From your own machine: localhost:port or 127.0.0.1:port
• From elsewhere on your network: 192.168.0.25:port where 192.168.0.25 is your machine's IP. Serve will attempt to tell you what this address is during launch.

Make sure your chosen port is open on your system's firewall if there are connection issues

• > serve -h

--port value, -p value       The local port that the server is to listen on (default: "5000")
--directory value, -d value  The directory to be served (default: ".")
--verbose, -v                Enable verbose logging (default: false)
--non-recursive, --nr        Disables recursive sharing (disallows access to child directories of shared root directory (default: false)
--no-caching, --nc           Disables HTTP Cache-Control headers to allow browser caching of server responses (default: false)
--help, -h                   show help (default: false)

• > ./serve

• > ./serve -d /path/to/dir

• > ./serve -d /path/to/dir -nr

+-- file.txt
+-- /super_secret_directory
|   +-- secret_plans.jpg
|   +-- evil_plan.pdf
+-- readme.md

With non-recursive sharing on, only the top-level of the root share is exposed. For example, file.txt and readme.md will be shared, but any requests for /super_secret_directory or any of its children will be dropped with a 404 response.

• > ./serve -d /path/to/dir -nc

Disabling caching headers will mean that frequent requests from the same host will respond with a disk cache as opposed coming to the server as a new request

• > serve -p 4500 -d ~/share -v -nr -nc

Serve, on local port 4500, the ~/share directory, with verbose logging and non recursive sharing enabled but browser caching disabled.

See releases