The best addition is that you can have a TLS connection too using ncat -lvnp 12345 –ssl

You can even specify your certificate and key! Brillant :)

I believe this should be tagged as self-submitted. (Unless I’m just misremembering the effect that has on colors?)

Pleasantly, Plan 9 has the ability to trivially serve an HTTP server as a shell script, such as rc-httpd(8):

https://github.com/9mirrors/plan9front/blob/front/rc/bin/rc-httpd/rc-httpd

You can get TLS without adding any code to your server(s) in Plan 9 as well by using tlssrv(8):

http://man.postnix.pw/9front/8/tlssrv

Some years ago I wrote my own local development web server in a few dozen lines of bash. I could never get nc to work for serving concurrent requests (i.e. html+js+css at the same time) but ncat works great.

It was actually really nice for prototyping with compile-to-js languages like ClojureScript or PureScript, as well as very quickly mocking up little CRUD apps. You’d write little executables to handle all the different HTTP verbs.

https://github.com/ianthehenry/httprintf

i.e. start it up, POST /some/resource, and it’ll try to run ./some/resource/POST if that script exists, then fall back to parent directories. Kind of a cute little hack.

If ya wanna use this on macOS, I think you’ll need to replace -q with -G to set the timeout interval. Very cool!

nc / netcat / ncat, there are so many not that compatible implementations, it’s one of the confusing tools I’ve ever used

python -m http.server

It’s been about 10 days that I setup socat for a test to provide a local web server to connect to with a client cert. Not the simplest anymore, but only one step above with a lot more features.