ws

A nimble web server

ws is a prototyping platform for web based services and websites.

ws has a minimal feature set

A simple static file webserver
- quick startup
- activity logged to the console
- supports http2 out of the box
A project setup option called init

Configuration

You can configure ws with command line options or environment variables. Try ws -help for a list of command line options.

Environment variables

WS_URL the URL to listen for by ws
- default is http://localhost:8000
WS_DOCROOT the directory of your static content you need to serve
- the default is ./htdocs
WS_SSL_KEY the path the the SSL key file (e.g. etc/ssl/site.key)
- default is empty, only checked if your WS_URL is starts with https://
WS_SSL_CERT the path the the SSL cert file (e.g. etc/ssl/site.crt)
- default is empty, only checked if your WS_URL is starts with https://

Command line options

-url overrides WS_URL
-docs overrides WS_DOCROOT
-ssl-key overrides WS_SSL_KEY
-ssl-pem overrides WS_SSL_PEM
-init triggers the initialization process and creates a setup.bash file
-h, -help displays the help documentation
-v, -version display the version of the command
-l, -license displays license information

Running ws without environment variables or command line options is an easy way to server your current working directory’s content out as http://localhost:8000.

Need to quickly build out a website from Markdown files or other JSON resources? Take a look at mkpage.

Installation

ws is available as precompile binaries for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows 10 on Intel. Additional binaries are provided for Raspbian on ARM6 adn ARM7. Follow the INSTALL.md instructions to download and install the pre-compiled binaries.

If you have Golang installed then ws can be installed with the go get command.

    go get github.com/caltechlibrary/ws/...

Compiling from source

Required

Golang version 1.7 or better

Here’s my basic approach to get things setup. Go 1.7 needs to be already installed.

  git clone https://github.com/caltechlibrary/ws
  cd ws
  go test
  go build
  go build cmds/ws/ws.go

If everything compiles fine then I do something like this–

  go install cmds/ws/ws.go

ws