Node.JS static file web server. Put it in your path to fire up servers in any directory, takes an optional port argument.

static_server.js

var http = require("http"),
    url = require("url"),
    path = require("path"),
    fs = require("fs"),
    mime = require("mime")
    port = process.argv[2] || 8888;

http.createServer(function(request, response) {

  var uri = url.parse(request.url).pathname
    , filename = path.join(process.cwd(), uri);
  
  path.exists(filename, function(exists) {
    if(!exists) {
      response.writeHead(404, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
      response.write("404 Not Found\n");
      response.end();
      return;
    }

	if (fs.statSync(filename).isDirectory()) filename += '/index.html';

    fs.readFile(filename, "binary", function(err, file) {
      if(err) {        
        response.writeHead(500, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
        response.write(err + "\n");
        response.end();
        return;
      }

      response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": mime.lookup(filename)});
      response.write(file, "binary");
      response.end();
    });
  });
}).listen(parseInt(port, 10));

console.log("Static file server running at\n  => http://localhost:" + port + "/\nCTRL + C to shutdown");

You should not. This is a good and simple example, that helps people to understand node, and might serve for testing, but this is not suitable for production. If you want a better example, look at how connect (http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/) does it.

I agree, this wouldn't be a good permanent solution. We needed something light weight and easy to setup quickly. It essentially servered up a glorified down for maintenance page while we were working on things. It did what we needed and was much easier than setting up apache or nginx.

Wow using this in production is looking for trouble... You could just request /../../..../../etc/passwd as there's no security validation

npm install mime Replaced path.exists with fs.exists

Just what I was looking for, thank you.

You are missing a comma at the end of line 5.

this doesn't work with utf8 names. path has to be url decoded first.