Given you’re a professional website designer and would like to work on some wonderful project. This project might be about designing a new website with a blog and a shop for one of your favourite customers. To get involved in this project, she asked you to design a mock-up with your ideas first and send it to her. In this article I’m going to show you how you can give away your mock-up in an easy manner without setting up a full-blown web server stack.
If you need to share files from your local system with others, you’ve got plenty of options. For some of them you need a client installed locally and an account at a remote website. Fortunately there are easier options available as most programming languages come with an HTTP server. In most cases it’s able to serve files from a local directory and is sufficient for a lot use cases. In this article I am going to show you, how I solved the problem by “writing” a local web server in Go running on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
Given you have two different customers which need to access the same resource. The URL should be the same for both, e.g. “https://www.example.org/resource.db”, but the response should be different. From “2.4” on the apache httpd can make use of its expressions in its rewrite engine. There’s an expression -R which does the “same as %{REMOTE_ADDR} -ipmatch ..., but more efficient” which matches the IP address of a requesting client to an IP network.
Some of my rubygems – e.g. proxy_pac_rb – either need a backing HTTP(S)-server for their tests or interact with some external web services via HTTP/HTTPS. To mock external services you can either use VCR, webmock or just plain Webrick. To serve data for your tests via HTTP(S), you can use Webrick as well. As Webrick is part of ruby core and is sufficient for both use cases, this article only describes ways to run a Webrick-HTTP(S)-server to back your test suite.
