Invoke Python SimpleHTTPServer from command line with no cache option

Of course the script above will not work for Python 3.x, but it just consists of changing the SimpleHTTPServer to http.server as shown below:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import http.server

class MyHTTPRequestHandler(http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
    def end_headers(self):
        self.send_my_headers()
        http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.end_headers(self)

    def send_my_headers(self):
        self.send_header("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")
        self.send_header("Pragma", "no-cache")
        self.send_header("Expires", "0")


if __name__ == '__main__':
    http.server.test(HandlerClass=MyHTTPRequestHandler)

I suggest that you press Ctrl+F5 when refreshing the browser.

Just ran into this, it can just might be the thing you are looking for (it's in ruby, by the way)

Maybe it's the browser caching your files not the SimpleHTTPServer. Try deactivating the browser cache first.

Perhaps this may work. Save the following to a file:

serveit.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import SimpleHTTPServer

class MyHTTPRequestHandler(SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
    def end_headers(self):
        self.send_my_headers()
        SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.end_headers(self)

    def send_my_headers(self):
        self.send_header("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")
        self.send_header("Pragma", "no-cache")
        self.send_header("Expires", "0")


if __name__ == '__main__':
    SimpleHTTPServer.test(HandlerClass=MyHTTPRequestHandler)

then run it using

python serveit.py 8000

to serve the current directory on port 8000. This was totally pulled from this gist, and seems to work great!

NOTE: If you're just looking to run a local webserver to serve static content, you may be interested in a precanned node solution to do this => http-server, which I've been using and seems to work great.

Also if you're on a mac, if you run this as root you can run it on port 80 or 443! For example

sudo python serveit.py 80

should allow you to run it and access it in your browser at http://localhost