Serve

Serve is a small Ruby script that makes it easy to start up a WEBrick server in any directory. Serve is ideal for HTML prototyping and simple file sharing. If the haml, redcloth, and bluecloth gems are installed serve can handle Haml, Sass, Textile, and Markdown (in addition to HTML and ERB).

Usage

At a command prompt all you need to type to start serve is:

$ serve

This will launch a WEBrick server which you can access from any Web browser at the following address:

http://localhost:4000

Once the server is going it will output a running log of its activity. To stop the server at any time, type CTRL+C at the command prompt. By default the serve command serves up files from the current directory. To change this behavior, ‘cd` to the appropriate directory before starting serve.

Advanced Options

The serve command automatically binds to 0.0.0.0 (localhost) and uses port 4000 by default. To serve files over a different IP (that is bound to your computer) or port specify those options on the command line:

$ serve 4000               # a custom port

$ serve 192.168.1.6        # a custom IP

$ serve 192.168.1.6:4000   # a custom IP and port

Rails Applications

For your convenience if the file “script/server” exists in the current directory the serve command will start that instead of launching a WEBrick server. You can specify the environment that you want to start the server with as an option on the command line:

$ serve production         # start script/server in production mode

File Types

Serve presently does special processing for files with following extensions:

textile

Evaluates the document as Textile (requires the Redcloth gem)

markdown

Evaluates the document as Markdown (requires the Bluecloth gem)

erb

Experimental support for ERB

haml

Evaluates the document as Haml (requires the Haml gem)

sass

Evaluates the document as Sass (requires the Haml gem)

email

Evaluates the document as if it is an e-mail message; the format is identical to a plain/text e-mail message’s source

redirect

Redirects to the URL contained in the document

View Helpers

If you drop a file called view_helpers.rb in the root of a project, you can define custom helpers for your Haml and ERB views. Just declare the ViewHelpers module and begin declaring your helpers:

module ViewHelpers
  def custom_method
    "Request object: #{request.headers['user-agent']}"
  end
end

Installation and Setup

It is recommended that you install serve via RubyGems:

$ sudo gem install serve

More Information

For more information, be sure to look through the documentation over at RubyForge:

Or visit the project page here:

All development now takes place on GitHub:

License

Serve is released under the MIT license and is copyright © 2006-2008 John W. Long. A copy of the MIT license can be found in the License.txt file.

Enjoy!

–

John Long

wiseheartdesign.com