Handcar

Lightweight development web server inspired by express and connect.

As the name suggests it's heavily inferior to express. It focusses only on the most useful features and provides them with a minimum of dependencies:

• ws the goto NodeJS WebSocket implementation (zero sub dependencies)
• commander excellent CLI agrument parser (zero sub dependencies)

STATUS: Working, but in development.

Features

• CLI
• HTTP/HTTPS
• WebSockets
• Static file hosting
• Live reload browser page

CLI

Usage: handcar [options] <webroot>

development webserver

Arguments:
  webroot            path to webroot

Options:
  -V, --version      output the version number
  -s, --https        Use HTTPS
  -H, --host <host>  Use '0.0.0.0' to expose the server (default: "localhost")
  -p, --port <port>  The port the webserver will use (default: 8080)
  -w, --no-watch     Prevent watching the webroot for changes
  -o, --open         Open browser
  -h, --help         display help for command

Example:

# start webserver in local directory using HTTPS and live reload.
handcar -s .

Usage

import { createServer } from 'handcar'

const app = createServer({
  host: '0.0.0.0',
  port: 8080,
  https: false,
  webroot: '.',
  watch: true,
  open: false
})

Setting https to true, will generate localhost-cert.pem and localhost-key.pem files in your CWD if they don't allready exist.

Sources

That helped me build handcar

• WebSocket Protocol RFC
• How to implement a websocket server
• express
• example/favicon.ico from Handcar icons created by Freepik - Flaticon