Question

After cding to my folder I enter

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

and get

Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...

in reply. But when I hit http://0.0.0.0:8000/test.html I get a page not found error.

I’ve also tried

pushd /path/you/want/to/serve; python -m SimpleHTTPServer; popd

taken from this question

When I hit ls I can see the file and the directory. Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

I think the other two answers are trying to make it clear that 0.0.0.0 is not the URL you should be visiting. When a Python web server (like cherrypy for instance) says it is serving on 0.0.0.0 it means it is listening for all TCP traffic that ends up at that machine no matter the hostname or IP that was requested. But, if you change it such that the socket listens on 127.0.0.1 or ‘localhost’, then unless the request was specifically to that IP/hostname, it won’t respond to the request. For example, many times you can use your machine name instead of localhost (ubuntu allows this for example). If your machine name is ‘brian’ and you have a server listening on 0.0.0.0:8080, you should be able to reach that server with http://brian:8080. But if that server is listening on ‘localhost’, even though ‘brian’ is set to point to ‘localhost’, the server won’t receive the message.

You also need to be sure the file really is in the directory you are running the command from. Otherwise, the 404 response is actually correct 🙂

Good luck!