Prototyping: Simplest HTTP server with URL routing (to use w/ Backbone.Router)?

Question

We're working on a Backbone.js application and the fact that we can start a HTTP server by typing python -m SimpleHTTPServer is brilliant.

We'd like the ability to route any URL (e.g. localhost:8000/path/to/something) to our index.html so that we can test Backbone.Router with HTML5 pushState.

What is the most painless way to accomplish that? (For the purpose of quick prototyping)

Answer 1

Just use the built in python functionality in BaseHTTPServer

import BaseHTTPServer

class Handler( BaseHTTPServer.BaseHTTPRequestHandler ):
    def do_GET( self ):
        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header( 'Content-type', 'text/html' )
        self.end_headers()
        self.wfile.write( open('index.html').read() )

httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer( ('127.0.0.1', 8000), Handler )
httpd.serve_forever()

Answer 2

1. Download and install CherryPy

2. Create the following python script (call it always_index.py or something like that) and also replace 'c:\index.html' with the path of your actual file that you want to use

   import cherrypy
   
   class Root:
       def __init__(self, content):
           self.content = content
   
       def default(self, *args):
           return self.content
       default.exposed = True
   
   cherrypy.quickstart(Root(open('c:\index.html', 'r').read()))
   

3. Run python <path\to\always_index.py>
4. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080 and no matter what url you request, you always get the same content.