How to start an HTTP server in Python?

You can create an HTTP server in python using the http.server module.

Starting server from the command line

To start a server from a command line, navigate to your projects directory

cd /dev/myproject

Then start an HTTP server using the following command:

python3 -m http.server

By default, this will run the contents of the directory on a local web server, on port 8000. You can go to this server by going to the URL localhost:8000 in your web browser.

Starting server programmatically

To start an HTTP server from within the python script, you can use socketerserver along with http.server. The SimpleHTTPRequestHandler class can be used in the following manner in order to create a very basic webserver serving files relative to the current directory:

import http.server
import socketserver

PORT = 8000

Handler = http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler

with socketserver.TCPServer(("", PORT), Handler) as httpd:
    print("serving at port", PORT)
    httpd.serve_forever()

This will run the contents of the directory on a local web server, on port 8000. You can go to this server by going to the URL localhost:8000 in your web browser.

Got an article suggestion? Let us know

Explore more

Python

Understanding Python super() with init() methods

Questions

How to remove a key from a Python dictionary?

Questions

Getting the class name of an instance in Python?

Questions

Importing files from different folder in Python?

Questions

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.