Question

I have a vpn connection and when I’m running python -m SimpleHTTPServer, it serves on 0.0.0.0:8000, which means it can be accessed via localhost and via my real ip.
I don’t want robots to scan me and interested that the server will be accessed only via localhost.

Is it possible?

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 127.0.0.1:8000  # doesn't work.

Any other simple http server which can be executed instantly using the command line is also welcome.

Answer 1

If you read the source you will see that only the port can be overridden on the command line. If you want to change the host it is served on, you will need to implement the test() method of the SimpleHTTPServer and BaseHTTPServer yourself. But that should be really easy.

Here is how you can do it, pretty easily:

import sys
from SimpleHTTPServer import SimpleHTTPRequestHandler
import BaseHTTPServer


def test(HandlerClass=SimpleHTTPRequestHandler,
         ServerClass=BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer):

    protocol = "HTTP/1.0"
    host = ''
    port = 8000
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        arg = sys.argv[1]
        if ':' in arg:
            host, port = arg.split(':')
            port = int(port)
        else:
            try:
                port = int(sys.argv[1])
            except:
                host = sys.argv[1]

    server_address = (host, port)

    HandlerClass.protocol_version = protocol
    httpd = ServerClass(server_address, HandlerClass)

    sa = httpd.socket.getsockname()
    print "Serving HTTP on", sa[0], "port", sa[1], "..."
    httpd.serve_forever()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    test()

And to use it:

> python server.py 127.0.0.1     
Serving HTTP on 127.0.0.1 port 8000 ...

> python server.py 127.0.0.1:9000
Serving HTTP on 127.0.0.1 port 9000 ...

> python server.py 8080          
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...