SimpleHTTPServer
To run SimpleHTTPServer, you are first going to want to become familiar using the Mac OS X terminal. The terminal provides "shell" access to your computer. You can browse directories and execute applications via text-based commands. You can find the Terminal app in Applications->Utilities->Terminal. Run it and you'll see something like.
The blinking cursor is the "prompt", where you can execute a command. Here is a list of some common commands you'll need.
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cd- change directory. The following, for example, will set the current path to your desktop. You'll want to replace "shiffman" with your username.cd /Users/shiffman/Desktop. -
pwd- print working directory. This will print out the current directory. -
ls- list the contents of the current directory.
This is barely scratching the surface of what you can do with unix commands. Adam Parrish's class also has a tutorial about using unix commands to manipulate text data. But we'll stop here, after all, we're just here to run a simple web server.
Your job is to get terminal to point to the directory on your computer where you are storing your p5.js work. On my computer I've got a ton of examples in a directory called "The-Nature-of-Code-Examples-p5.js". So I'm going to browse to it by doing the following.
$ cd /Users/shiffman/Documents/noc/The-Nature-of-Code-Examples-p5.js
(You don't need to type the '$' I'm just using it to represent a prompt.)
Once I'm there, I can start up a web server with the following command.
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer
I should then see:
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 ...
This means the server is up and running at localhost on port 8000. And this means I can type http://localhost:8000/ into the address of a web browser and I'll see:
