A lightweight web server

Technically, most of the content we will craft can render directly in the browser without the use of a web server. However, we highly recommend you not to go ahead with this approach. Running a web server in your local development environment is extremely easy and provides several benefits:

For our choice of the web server and other tools in our toolbox, we will rely on a Node.js package named http-server. Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime, which is used to build fast, scalable network applications. The platform includes Node Package Manager (npm), which was created by other members of the vibrant Node.js community and allows the developer to quickly install packages of prebuilt software.

To install Node.js, simply perform the following steps:

To test the installation, type in the following in the command line:

node –v
v0.10.26 # or something similar should return

Now that Node.js and npm are installed, we can proceed to install the web server. When the web server is installed globally with the –g command, it becomes easily accessible throughout the system.

Once on the command line, enter the following:

npm install -g http-server

You can quickly verify the package was installed by typing the following:

http-server

Then open your web browser to http://localhost:8080. The browser should display a list of all the files in the directory from where you initiated the command.