Running http-server in background from an npm script

Probably the cross platform problem can be solved by npm-run-all

You can run a process in background by appending & in the end. And then use the postscript hook that npm offers us, in order to kill the background process.

"scripts": {
    "web-server": "http-server -p 7777 httpdocs &",
    "pretest": "gulp build-httpdocs && npm run web-server",
    "test": "mocha spec.js",
    "posttest": "pkill -f http-server"
}

But what if I have multiple http-server running?

You can kill a process by specifying its port in the posttest script:

    "posttest": "kill $(lsof -t -i:7777)"

Now for Windows, syntax is different and as far as I know npm doesn't support multiple OS scripts. For supporting multiple my best bet would be a gulp task that will handle each OS different.