Skip to main content

Development Server Alternatives

Besides running a local copy of Apache on Nginx or your dev box, or using *vagrant*, the only other alternatives for a long time were XAMPP, MAMP, etc. While there are certainly good arguments for using them, for folks like Web Designers and such, there are a lot of technical hoops to jump through that just aren't needed for these types of use cases. And, there are times as well where we coders might want to throw up some flavor of CGI scripted code, and not have to mess with any of the above. Along come two excellent solutions, one completely Open Source, the other Open Source enough for the above use case. In fact, the completely open source solution is a fork of the other, prior to its changing its license to GPL.
What I'm talking about is:

Basic Rundown

The Mongoose Docs will cover all the nuances, but basically, you can download the .dmg, open it, drag the app where ever you want to run it from, and double-click it. When the app opens up, it places a menu icon in your top menu bar of your desktop that you can interface with. The Civetweb Docs will again cover the details, but as a quick-start, download the .dmg, open it, drag the app to where you want it, double-click it, and it will place a menu icon in the top menu bar of your desktop. In both cases, basic usage is simple. After starting the app, open the menu and select: 
Edit Configuration
This will open the servers config file in your default .txt application for editing. Somewhere in the short list of items is: 
document_root
All you have to do is point that to the absolute address of the folder from which you want the contents served. Stop, then re-start Mongoose | Civetweb, and it will begin serving index.html (or index.php) from that folder on: 
localhost:8080
... so make sure that port isn't blocked from something else. However, if for some reason you want it to serve from a different port, not a problem. That option, along with a host of others, is available in the previously mentioned config file. These servers will also run Lua Server Pages, and even perl. So folks, if you don't already know about them, they are well worth checking out for those little/quickie jobs where going through the dance of a heavier stack isn't needed.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Codeigniter vs. Kohana Database access speeds

I was doing some basic profiling for a project in which I needed the fastest raw speed I could get with database queries. I'm a fan of Codeigniter for projects that are suitable for it, but had heard from some that Kohana was faster, so I decided to do a very basic comparison of the two. I was using MAMP for OSX, and created a very small db, with a table that had 3 fields: (id), (first), and (last). The data sample was also very small, only a few records. The basic query I tested was a "SELECT * FROM [table]". There is of course nothing remotely scientific about this. It was just a quick ad dirty, very limited comparison. Take it as such. Versions used: CI2.1.3, Kohana 3.3.0. Codeigniter I really like Codeigniter (CI). But, one thing that is very evident from their own profiling functions, is that CI is a bit of a memory hog! Essentially, the same Controller function running in CI takes approximately 10X more memory than in Kohana! This in itself is not ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dead Simple React.js with Meteor

I spent a little time exploring the patterns involved in using React.js with Meteor. It's incredibly easy, it turns out. I'll show some examples here. The setup: meteor add kadira:flow-router npm install react react-dom react-mounter npm install react-addons-pure-render-mixin meteor add react-meteor-data Then of course remove all blaze related meteor packages. Ok, Some basic component patterns: Let's create one that accepts a single argument: Hello.jsx import React from 'react'; export const Hello = ({name}) => ( <div>Hello, {name}</div> ); That's all there is to it. Now, let's see a pattern for a component that takes two arguments. We can see that to add further arguments, we can just tack them on after the first two: TwoArgs.jsx import React from 'react'; export const TwoArgs = ({one, two}) => ( <div> <h2>TwoArgs!</h2> <h3>One is: {one}</h3> <h3>Two is: {two}...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fun with Meteor, React, and React-Bootstrap

React-Bootstrap is pretty cool. I decided to play with it a bit.  Here are the basics. In an already set up Meteor project (set up for React), it is added thus: npm install --save react-bootstrap Once this is done, you also need to add a bootstrap library. It could either be the twitter bootstrap meteor package, or you can link to it. For the purpose of my demo, I just grabbed a couple links from the React-Bootstrap site that they had handy for pulling in from a CMS: index.html <head> <!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS --> <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/latest/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> </link> <!-- Optional theme --> <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/latest/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> </link> </head> Now, let's make a layout, and then create a component tha...
Post a Comment
Read more