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How To Share Any Folder On Mac Via Built-in Web Server

 ·  ☕ 2 min read  ·  ✍️ Dinesh

So what’s new here? Well I was playing around with Phonegap to build a small android and ios app. I was able to build a small weather app using Yahoo weather api but then I came across Sencha Touch 2.

I wanted to build the same app in Sencha Touch and compare the two platforms for developing mobile apps and as ap part of its get started tutorial I had to drop the  Sencha Touch in a web server. Now as it always happens with me the most simplest of things don’t work properly for me. I turned on apache server on my mac and added my directory on /etc/apache2/httpd.conf along with and Alias but that did not work out. I constantly ran in forbidden 403 error and tried everything described in various forums but nothing worked and then I came across a post which showed me an alternative way to run a webserver and access my folder without the hassle of apache2 httpd.conf file changes.

It’s really simple, all you need to do is figure out which folder you want to get access to on web server. In my case I wanted to share /Users/dinesharora/Desktop/Mydocument/softwares/sencha-touch-2

so here are the steps:

  1. Open the terminal

  2. cd /Users/dinesharora/Desktop/Mydocument/softwares/sencha-touch-2

  3. type python -m SimpleHTTPServer

  4. Hit enter

You will see a message - 

Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000

Now if for some reason you are a stickler and like the old-fashioned 8080 port then just type 

1
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

That’s it. Now access your folder via http://localhost:8000/. If you want to get access to this over another machine then just type http://localhost:8080, so for example in my case it would be http://dinesharora.local:8080

Now you know how to fly a plane, but do you know how to do a safe landing?? Just hit control +c to shut down the server. Dumb!!

Cheers!!

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Dinesh Arora
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Dinesh
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