Start WEBrick Web Server Here

technical

I have started dabbling with Ember.js and it sure looks awesome!

This necessitated a quick and easy way to start serving the current directory through some webserver. And because of the recent adventures with Octopress, I happened to be aware of the presence of WEBrick as a nifty, light-weight server.

This led me to google "start a webrick server at current directory windows" and the first link was to this question on Stack Overflow.

Thanks to the highly voted (albeit not the accepted) answer there, I added this snippet to my .bashrc:

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function serve {
  port="${1:-3000}"
  ruby -r webrick -e "s = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => $port, :DocumentRoot => Dir.pwd); trap('INT') { s.shutdown }; s.start"
}

And, Voila! I now have the current directory served via WEBrick, just by using the command of serve <desired-port-number>.

That was good!