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miniserve - a CLI tool to serve files and dirs over HTTP

Build Status Docker Hub AUR Crates.io dependency status license Stars Downloads

For when you really just want to serve some files over HTTP right now!

miniserve is a small, self-contained cross-platform CLI tool that allows you to just grab the binary and serve some file(s) via HTTP. Sometimes this is just a more practical and quick way than doing things properly.

Screenshot

Screenshot

How to use

Serve a directory:

miniserve linux-distro-collection/

Serve a single file:

miniserve linux-distro.iso

Require username/password:

miniserve --auth joe:123 unreleased-linux-distros/

Generate random 6-hexdigit URL:

miniserve -i 192.168.0.1 --random-route /tmp
# Serving path /private/tmp at http://192.168.0.1/c789b6

Bind to multiple interfaces:

miniserve -i 192.168.0.1 -i 10.13.37.10 -i ::1 /tmp/myshare

Features

  • Easy to use
  • Just works: Correct MIME types handling out of the box
  • Single binary drop-in with no extra dependencies required
  • Authentication support with username and password (and hashed password)
  • Mega fast and highly parallel (thanks to Rust and Actix)
  • Folder download (compressed in .tar.gz)
  • File uploading

Known limitations

  • For now, the tar.gz compression is not async-ready, which means that the whole archive needs to be created (in memory) before the download starts. While it should not be a problem for small folders, the download feature can really get resource-heavy for large folders.

How to install

On Linux: Download miniserve-linux from the releases page and run

chmod +x miniserve-linux
./miniserve-linux

On OSX: Download miniserve-osx from the releases page and run

chmod +x miniserve-osx
./miniserve-osx

On Windows: Download miniserve-win.exe from the releases page and run

miniserve-win.exe

With Cargo: You will need the nightly version of Rust to compile the project. Then you can run

cargo install miniserve
miniserve

With Docker: If you prefer using Docker for this, run

docker run -v /tmp:/tmp -p 8080:8080 --rm -it svenstaro/miniserve /tmp

Binding behavior

For convenience reasons, miniserve will try to bind on all interfaces by default (if no -i is provided). It will also do that if explicitly provided with -i 0.0.0.0 or -i ::. In all of the aforementioned cases, it will bind on both IPv4 and IPv6. If provided with an explicit non-default interface, it will ONLY bind to that interface. You can provide -i multiple times to bind to multiple interfaces at the same time.

Why use this over alternatives?

  • darkhttpd: Not easily available on Windows and it's not as easy as download and go.
  • Python built-in webserver: Need to have Python installed, it's low performance, and also doesn't do correct MIME type handling in some cases.
  • netcat: Not as convenient to use and sending directories is somewhat involved.

Releasing

This is mostly a note for me on how to release this thing:

  • Update version in Cargo.toml and run cargo update.
  • git commit and git tag -s, git push.
  • cargo publish
  • Releases will automatically be deployed by Travis.
  • Update AUR package.