Today I was debugging a Javascript bug in ExtJS + AIR, and I wanted to check rendering in another browser. I created a static html file with the minimal javascript test case embedded in it, but then realised that I needed to load in the ExtJS files from somewhere. With other JS libraries you can use freely available CDNs for this sort of thing, but because ExtJS has funky ideas about licensing, this isn’t an option. What I needed was a quick and easy way to serve up the ExtJS files, which were sitting in a folder on my computer, over http. This sort of thing happens frequently with custom code too, when you attempt to create a static (minimal test case) version of a live site.
Plack has a really neat solution to this problem.
Following a tip from day #5 of Miyagawa’s Plack advent calendar, serving up the current directory over http is as simple as this Perl one-liner:
$ plackup -MPlack::App::Directory -e 'Plack::App::Directory->new Plack::Server::Standalone: Accepting connections at http://0:5000/
Or if you need the files served over port 80:
$ sudo plackup -MPlack::App::Directory -e 'Plack::App::Directory->new' -p 80 Plack::Server::Standalone: Accepting connections at http://0:80/
