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I'm looking for an HTTP server that can be invoked from the command line for localhost. I want it to be able to watch static html and css files for changes and reload the page viewed in a browser when changes are noticed.

I've found a number of nodejs packages filling this task, but many of them don't work well. Here are the nodejs packages I tried:

  • live-server is doing it good for the default default.html and index.html pages. If I want to watch an HTML page which is not index.html or default.html, I don't see the browser actually updates.
  • fast-live-reload perhaps is not suited for static web pages and only for web applications of some sort.
  • livereload just doesn't work at all, perhaps it is not suited for static web pages and only for web applications as well

EDIT

  • nginx is an overkill.

webpack-dev-server seems like is good choice only for people who work with the webpack JS framework. I tried it with webpack-dev-server . and it gives me the following errors:

ERROR in multi (webpack)-dev-server/client?http://localhost:8080 ./
Module not found: Error: Can't resolve '/home/doron/repos/mathrills.com/' in '/home/doron/repos/mathrills.com'
@ multi (webpack)-dev-server/client?http://localhost:8080 ./
webpack: Failed to compile

While searching the internet, it seemed that most of these packages are not meant for static and plain HTML and CSS web pages. I'm not a web applications developer. I just want to write plain HTML and CSS and that's all.

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  • Well, the only way to do this with HTML pages only and no specific server support is to have the page regularly reload itself on a timer and configure the page so it is not cached by the browser (probably with <meta> tags). Any sort of smart reload that only reloads when the page actually changes on the server will need custom server support for that and will likely need a persistent webSocket connection from web page to server to the browser can be told by the server when to fetch updated content.
    – jfriend00
    Commented Dec 13, 2017 at 17:00

2 Answers 2

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There was a question about this on StackOverflow several years ago:

Best lightweight web server (only static content) for windows

Options suggested there were:

  1. Mongoose: A small, single executable, embeddable server <- but you'd need to check if it can notice changes to the static files
  2. Use the Python webserver module (i.e. python -m http.server <PORT>) - assuming you can configure it to do what you want
  3. thttpd : A nother very small server; it's man page says it monitors the configuration file for changes, so chances are it also monitors the served files for changes (or simply doesn't cache a copy of them).
  4. nginx or lighttpd: Possibly overkill in terms of features, but nginx is modular and both have small footprints, supposedly.

and there are more...

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You're talking about something to reload the web browser while you write HTML/CSS right?

webpack-dev-server is perfect for this.

You should be able to find a yeoman generator to set up the right boiler plate for you. But if you're interested, you can just clone a project I have for writing my CV in HTML, which does what you're looking for.

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  • First of all, yes, I want it only for pure HTML,CSS and JS. Additionally, I tried webpack-dev-server and I get lot's of errors about unfound modules. I edited the original post.
    – Doron Behar
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 19:47
  • ... Did you run npm install? Getting started with npm/node can be a bit of work at first - as there are a few dependencies that you need to use first. Did you try my github project?
    – dwjohnston
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 21:16
  • Of course I did, I installed webpack and webpack-dev-server with npm install -g.
    – Doron Behar
    Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 17:37

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