Personal web server on MacOS Sierra?

March 17, 2017 2:07 PM

The MacOS used to offer one click personal websharing. But it seems that feature was taken out and moved to MacOS Server? Is there way to re-enable it in MacOS Sierra? Or does one simply download and install the server version along side the regular version? Sooooooo confused!
posted by Brandon Blatcher to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

According to this guy, Apache is already installed, you just need to

sudo apachectl start

The link gives further instruction.
posted by w0mbat at 2:17 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

These days, macOS Server is just an addon that you can get from the App Store if you think it's worth $20 to be able to check a box to start Apache instead of doing it from the command line as described in w0mbat's answer.
posted by zsazsa at 2:42 PM on March 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Best answer: You might check out Caddy. It's written in Go and is a single executable file webserver that supports a surprising amount of handy stuff. Automatic LetsEncrypt SSL certs, HTTPS/2, automatic dynamic DNS registration, FastCGI (for PHP), yadda yadda. All in a single binary with no dependencies and one config file.

I've used it a couple of times on machines where I didn't know the OS specifics and didn't want to try to get apache/nginx installed and configured or even make some Python/Perl simple HTTP server foo work. With Caddy you just copy one file and a simple config and it runs and you're done.

But if you can just start apache and get what you were expecting, go for it
posted by zengargoyle at 3:41 PM on March 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm super bummed this isn't available by default anymore. That simple feature was hugely useful for me in learning CSS, for example, and other bits early in the 21st century. Making it harder to get to does a disservice to folks who want easy access to a simple Apache install. :(
posted by uberchet at 9:39 AM on March 20, 2017