adsf

adsf (A Dead Simple Fileserver) is a tiny static file server that you can launch instantly in any directory, like this:

▸ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 ddfreyne  staff  68 May 29 10:04 about
drwxr-xr-x  2 ddfreyne  staff  68 May 29 10:04 contact
-rw-r--r--  1 ddfreyne  staff   0 May 29 10:04 index.html
drwxr-xr-x  2 ddfreyne  staff  68 May 29 10:04 projects

▸ adsf
[2009-05-29 10:04:44] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2009-05-29 10:04:44] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11) [i686-darwin9.6.1]
[2009-05-29 10:04:44] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=2757 port=3000

… and now you can go to http://localhost:3000/ and start browsing.

You can specify a custom web root with -r or --root; the server will be started in that directory (e.g. adsf -r public/). If you want to specificy custom index filenames (other than the default index.html), you can use the -i or --index-filename option, which is a comma-separated list of filenames (e.g. adsf -i index.html,index.xml).

adsf has one dependency, namely on Rack. It is licenced under the MIT license. Patches are always welcome; check my contact e-mail address at the bottom of this document.

Using adsf programmatically

You can use adsf programmatically in your Rack applications. nanoc uses adsf for its “view” command, for example. adsf consists of one middleware class that finds index filenames, and rewrites these requests so that Rack::File can be used to serve these files.

Here’s an example middleware/application stack that runs a web server with the "public/" directory as its web root:

use Adsf::Rack::IndexFileFinder, :root => "public/"
run Rack::File.new("public/")

The :root option is required; it should contain the path to the web root.

You can also specify an :index_filenames option, containing the names of the index filenames that will be served when a directory containing an index file is requested. Usually, this will simply be [ 'index.html' ], but under different circumstances (when using IIS, for exmaple), the array may have to be modified to include index filenames such as default.html or index.xml. Here’s an example middleware/application stack that uses custom index filenames:

use Adsf::Rack::IndexFileFinder,
  :root => "public/",
  :index_filenames => %w( index.html index.xhtml index.xml )
run Rack::File.new("public/")

Authors

• Denis Defreyne
• Mark Meves

Contact

You can reach me at [email protected].