Spark web server

https://github.com/rif/spark

by rif • 12 years ago

54 48 12 years ago

github.com

Little web server for emergencies

michaelmior• 12 years ago

I was wondering why I would want this, but being able to pass some HTML on the command line is pretty cool.

Alan_• 12 years ago

I can't see anywhere in the code so assume this returns a 200 code for requests. If was using this to show maintenance for my website would want it to return 503.

rif8• 12 years ago

Good point!

rif8• 12 years ago

Added a parameter to stet the desired status

raimue• 12 years ago

You could achieve something similar using the simple HTTP server shipped with python: python -m SimpleHTTPServer

kordless• 12 years ago

Which will melt with any sort of sustained traffic.

hysan• 12 years ago

Except, that's not the use case for Spark so it's an apt comparison.

Emergency web server
For those occasions when your webserver is down and you want to display a quick maintainance note. Or just want to quickly demo a static site. Or whatever :)

rektide• 12 years ago

As opposed to Spark, the microcontroller platform. As opposed to Spark, the resilient distributed data system. As opposed to Spark, the open source IM client.

Zikes• 12 years ago

Yep, should've gone with Zitser or Poppler.

drv• 12 years ago

You were probably being facetious, but Poppler is already used too (PDF rendering library).

kitd• 12 years ago

... as opposed to Spark (http://www.sparkjava.com/), the Java web server.

qrohlf• 12 years ago

...as opposed to Spark[1], the tool by @holman.

[1]http://zachholman.com/spark/

dewey• 12 years ago

If you just want a small httpd there's also gatling and fnord.

[0] http://www.fefe.de/gatling/ [1] http://www.fefe.de/fnord/

rif8• 12 years ago

this one has 45 lines of code :)

bestham2• 12 years ago

Well, the binary contains a lot of go.

justincormack• 12 years ago

Or webfsd. or bozohttpd or...

dangerlibrary3• 12 years ago

Is it really that hard to add 5 lines of boilerplate to your nginx conf? You can probably just copy-paste an existing server{} block or sites-available file and change the root directory. As a bonus, you'll learn a bit about how to configure the same tool you'll use later in production.

Oh. It's written in Go. Got it.

rif8• 12 years ago

Does nginx have a directive for serving this text quickliy:

<h1>Maintenance</h1><p>will be back soon!</p>

Oh. It's written in C. Got it.

dangerlibrary3• 12 years ago

You still need to stop the existing web server to get spark to take over port 80, and restart it when you are done, so it's not quite that simple.

Also, it's not hard to keep a maintenance conf file around, pointing to a different directory. At least, it's certainly no harder than downloading a second web server. Then it's just "sudo ln /etc/sites-available/maintenance /etc/sites-enabled/conf"

dangayle2• 12 years ago

Yes it does, although not out of the box:

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpEchoModule

sanderjd2• 12 years ago

I'm so sick of seeing this pattern of 1) person makes tool they find useful, 2) person releases tool publicly for free, 3) other person comes across tool but doesn't find it useful, 4) other person publicly denigrates tool as being universally not-useful.

I just don't get it.

dangerlibrary3• 12 years ago

I don't think I said anything negative about the tool itself, or about the author of the tool, who seems perfectly happy with it.

You're right that I don't think it's useful to have a proliferation of tools that do one thing worse than a general-purpose tool.

I don't want an avocado peeler - I'll use a knife and I'll recommend using a knife to others.

tzury• 12 years ago

@dangerlibrary simply says: Do not re-invent the wheel. I cannot see any real-world production environment where this new server is better approach then activating a tiny config file. Thus, it is a very good lesson to the author: Use what is out there and build what is missing.

a-nom-a-ly• 12 years ago

    # pgrep nginx
    #

incidence• 12 years ago

Thanks! I have have been using "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" a lot, it is kind of a pain in the ass since it hangs sometimes in a weird way.

swah• 12 years ago

Can someone explain this function signature? I can't grep it.

func (h bytesHandler) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request)

zek• 12 years ago

you have to get used to get go's backwards type declaration. This is defining a method on h which is a byteHandler struct called serve which takes a http.ResponseWriter and Request and returns nothing.

This is from the http.Handler interface, so defining this method causes byteHandler to conform to the http.Handler interface.

zaphar• 12 years ago

byteHandler is not a struct it's a byte slice. This is actually somewhat important since it highlights a nice feature of go where you can declare methods on any baseType by aliasing them to your own type.

There is no struct involved here and there doesn't need to be which is nice.

BarkMore• 12 years ago

The type bytesHandler is a slice of bytes:

    type bytesHandler []byte

The code

    func (h bytesHandler) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
	w.Write(h)
    }

is a method declaration for the type bytesHandler. The (h bytesHandler) specifies id and type of the method receiver.

jjoe• 12 years ago

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Above will serve whatever files you have in $PWD

dbpatterson• 12 years ago

And be _insanely_ slow (not just the normal, python is slow comment - there are fast web servers in python; SimpleHTTPServer is not).

Spark web server

Related Stories