How I share a file, simply
2014-06-08
Earlier, I saw this article claiming to describe how to share a file "simply" by running Python's web server module (with either Python 2 or 3). While that may be easy, it's not simple, and certainly not fast.
The largest problem with using Python or Ruby to run a web server instead of a single-purpose program is initialisation time. Regardless of performance under load or latency or whatever, the fact is that running "python3 -m http.server" takes tens of seconds to reach a usable state on an older machine, and minutes on even older ones. This is unacceptable if all you want to do is share a text file which would take less than a second to download - it's ludicrous to spend more time waiting for a server to start than actually using it.
The alternative
I use thttpd. While the site may not look modern and it seems like they went out of their way to make it look ugly, the software that runs it is very performant, portable, and everything you could ever want in a quick-and-dirty web server solution.
Even better it starts within a second even on really old hardware. If you want to share a directory, here's what you do:
$ thttpd
That was very simple, fast and easy! The problem is that you need to be root to bind to port 80, so just kill that process and start another one, like this:
$ thttpd -p 8000
That can be run as any user, since port 8000 is high enough not to need
root to be used. Since it daemonizes straight away, to kill it, you need
to use pkill.
$ pkill thttpd
And that's that. A simpler than starting up an interpreter for a programming language and loading modules within modules of code just to serve a couple of files.
Scripting it
While that's all well and good, just like the author of the article I
linked, I want to be able to run share and share my files, so I wrote
a script. This is going beyond the realm of simple, but it'll certainly
be convenient.
#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Starting thttpd: "
if thttpd -p 8000; then
echo "done"
else
echo "failed"
fi
That does start the server, but doesn't give us any way to kill it and
it doesn't tell us our IP address (which we might not know due to DHCP
on an unfamiliar network). After echo "done", add in something to tell
us our IP, then wait for the user to press enter and kill the server:
#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Starting thttpd: "
if thttpd -p 8000; then
echo "done"
ifconfig | grep inet
read line
pkill thttpd
else
echo "failed"
fi
That is OK, but we can do better to show us our IP - as it is, the script outputs this:
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 inet6 fe80::213:e8ff:fe73:485%iwn0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 inet 192.168.0.9 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
Sure the IP is in there, but it's too messy. I replaced grep inet with
something a little more sophisticated:
grep -o '[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}'
That regex shows us all of the IPs in ifconfig's output, but it also shows the broadcast address and doesn't show us the port. To fix that, we can pipe the whole thing into this:
awk '!/255$/{ print $0 ":8000"}'
The finished script looks like this:
#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Starting thttpd: "
if thttpd -p 8000; then
echo "done"
ifconfig \
| grep -o '[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}' \
| awk '!/255$/{ print $0 ":8000"}'
read line
pkill thttpd
else
echo "failed"
fi
And its output looks like this:
Starting thttpd: done
127.0.0.1:8000
192.168.0.9:8000
Now you can type share and have a web server up in a minimum of time.