The development web server that we choose greatly depends on the platform that we work on and the backend we support. However, for apps in this book that target purely client-side development, any web server will do.
My recommendation would be to use the http-server module of Node.js. Since Node.js is available cross-platform, we can install Node.js from http://nodejs.org/.
Once Node.js is installed, installing the http-server module and running the http server are easy. Open the command line and type the following command:
npm install http-server –g
This installs the HTTP server at the global level.
To run the server, just navigate to the folder where the app code resides, or open the folder from where we want to serve static files, and type this:
http-server
And that's it! We have an HTTP server running at http://localhost:8080 that can serve files from the current directory.
Note
The http-server module does support some startup configurations. Check the documentation at https://github.com/nodeapps/http-server.
The http-server module is just one of the many options available out there. Depending upon the platform we are on, we can also try Python's SimpleHTTPServer module, Mongoose, or any such web server.
Let's build Guess the Number!.