On Windows 7, I am using the command line
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888
to invoke a simple web server to serve files from a directory, for development.
The problem is that the server seems to keep the files in cache. Old versions of files are served despite newer ones being available.
Is there a way to specify the "no cache" option from the command line directly?
Perhaps this may work. Save the following to a file:
serveit.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
import SimpleHTTPServer
class MyHTTPRequestHandler(SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
def end_headers(self):
self.send_my_headers()
SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.end_headers(self)
def send_my_headers(self):
self.send_header("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")
self.send_header("Pragma", "no-cache")
self.send_header("Expires", "0")
if __name__ == '__main__':
SimpleHTTPServer.test(HandlerClass=MyHTTPRequestHandler)
then run it using
python serveit.py 8000
to serve the current directory on port 8000. This was totally pulled from this gist, and seems to work great!
NOTE: If you're just looking to run a local webserver to serve static content, you may be interested in a precanned node solution to do this => http-server, which I've been using and seems to work great.
Also if you're on a mac, if you run this as root you can run it on port 80 or 443! For example
sudo python serveit.py 80
should allow you to run it and access it in your browser at http://localhost
.bash_profile makes it more convenient to use: alias server="open http://localhost:8000/ && echo 'Starting server at localhost:8000' && python ~/serveit.py 8000 > /dev/null 2>&1"
Last-Modified header; it doesn't send max-age or any explicit info how long its valid but browsers cache by default for some heuristic time:stackoverflow.com/questions/14496694/…, stackoverflow.com/a/31852117/239657, unless explicitly told not to (which "Cache-Control" here does).
Of course the script above will not work for Python 3.x, but it just consists of changing the SimpleHTTPServer to http.server as shown below:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import http.server
class MyHTTPRequestHandler(http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
def end_headers(self):
self.send_my_headers()
http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.end_headers(self)
def send_my_headers(self):
self.send_header("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")
self.send_header("Pragma", "no-cache")
self.send_header("Expires", "0")
if __name__ == '__main__':
http.server.test(HandlerClass=MyHTTPRequestHandler)
I suggest that you press Ctrl+F5 when refreshing the browser.
Just ran into this, it can just might be the thing you are looking for (it's in ruby, by the way)
Maybe it's the browser caching your files not the SimpleHTTPServer. Try deactivating the browser cache first.
I changed to another port number and the updated file reflected on my browser.
ex.
python -m http.server -p 8000
python -m http.server -p 8001
