Simple http file server

[alberic89]

I am trying to have a simple http server who just serve the file in a given directory.
It is like the python -m htt.server, or the zig std, that serve local files.
There is in the standard library a http.Server, but there is no instruction about how to use it.
I know also that there is zap, who can serve my files, but I prefer to avoid dependencies.

The goal is just to provide a simple way to test my Zig code compiled to WASM through a webpage, during a build step (like zig build run).

I don’t know if it is simple or complicated, if I can reuse std code or not.
So any help is welcome !

[Sze]

@alberic89

but I prefer to avoid dependencies

I don’t agree with that, I think using a dependency is the way to solve this.

Avoiding dependencies seems strange to me, similar to sticking with zig test ... or zig build-exe ... for way too long, instead of writing a build.zig, but maybe that is because I don’t understand the appeal in some specific workflow, why do you want to avoid dependencies?

This is something that works for autodocs:

A "just-enough-functionality" Zig docs server: zds

zds comes in at just 70k in ReleaseSmall on my m1 mac. It’s hardcoded to just serve the Zig autodoc files in the current working directory. Thre’s a sample project in the sample directory with a build.zig that shows one possible way of using this. The relevant code in that sample build.zig: const docs_wf = b.addWriteFiles(); _ = docs_wf.addCopyDirectory(exe.getEmittedDocs(), "docs", .{}); const zds_wf = b.addWriteFiles(); const zds_src = zds_wf.add("zds.zig", \\const…

This dependency from player/build.zig.zon at main - andrewrk/player - Codeberg.org seems to provide more general functionality, that isn’t just for serving autodocs:
GitHub - andrewrk/StaticHttpFileServer: Zig module for serving a directory of files from memory via HTTP

I haven’t used it yet, but was planning to try to use it for a local development build step.

[Sze]

Also this discussion is related:

Documentation Tooling

I was thinking it would be nice to offer the zig std workflow via a build step. So you could introduce zig build view-docs or something like that and have it basically do the same thing that zig std does but for your application’s documentation. Point being that you could observe doc comment changes via refreshing the page in the browser. Of course, it would also let you make patches to the Zig autodocs wasm code and observe them immediately so that contributors could offer improvements to auto…

I wonder if that solution could be implemented to be non-autodocs specific and instead work for wasm in general (maybe via customization).