Serve local HTML and CSS files with http.server

Batteries included is a blog series about the Python Standard Library. Each day, I share insights, ideas and examples for different parts of the library. Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month.

In addition to importing functionality from standard library modules to your Python scripts, some modules can be run with python -m [module] (docs), providing nice command line tooling.

Today we look at one of those options, http.server.

If you have folder with HTML and CSS files like this:

$ tree
.
├── about.html
├── css
│   ├── feature.css
│   └── main.css
├── feature.html
└── index.html

2 directories, 5 files

You can serve them locally with

$ python -m http.server
Serving HTTP on :: port 8000 (http://[::]:8000/) ...

and browse through your website.