A local development server

For a long time, I used Vercel’s serve for local development. It’s simple, and I like that it prints both local and network addresses. But recently I was developing gitmal, which generates relative links like ../../ for navigation, and Vercel’s server didn’t behave properly. It strips / and .html parts from URLs.

Obviously, PHP and Python both have built‑in servers. But I like the npx approach, so I decided to check how serve works. I discovered it has a tremendous number of dependencies—hundreds. So I looked for an alternative. One popular option is http-server, but it also pulls in a long tail of dependencies.

So I wrote my own, with zero dependencies: srf.

Serving public/

    - Local:    http://0.0.0.0:8080
    - Network:  http://192.168.1.42:8080

[2025-12-03T20:00:42.007Z] GET /index.html -> 200

Single file, no dependencies, and twice as fast as the solutions above.

Srf also has a built-in directory listing. It’s pretty simple and generates minimal HTML. Nowadays, it’s super simple to create a nice-looking HTML page with as little as this:

html { 
  color-scheme: light dark; 
  font: 16px system-ui; 
}

This gives you light and dark themes, plus a nicer font. Nothing else is needed.

Why is it called srf? Because I was looking for a short, free npm package name so I can do this:

npx srf