Hot-reloading with busybox httpd

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 14:32:16 +0000

Intro ¶

I’ve been recently working on a simple static website¹. I quickly noticed previewing it by browsing index.html is far from perfect. I needed a local server to host it. Ubuntu comes with busybox httpd by default so I decided to give it a go.

The server can host files form the current dir (-f makes it run in foreground rather than as a daemon):

busybox httpd -f -p 8090

It worked great until I got tired with hitting F5 to reload the page. I needed hot-reloading.

Need for Blog

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 14:41:13 +0100

I’ve had a few attempts to start my own dev blog or website. However I would have always been pushed away by cumbersomeness of blogging platforms. To be fair I’ve never liked web interfaces. Needed a more dev-centric way of publishing own content. And finally I have discovered one that works for me (better later than never). It’s called static websites generation and it isn’t anything new whatsoever. Static websites are as old as the internet itself however thanks to evolution of web technologies (namely JavaScript, CSS, HTML, web browsers) it has been brought to a completely new level. The idea is to generate your web site in advance removing a need of a complex server environment (like databases or server-side processing). Obviously it has its limitations but I believe it works for blog-like websites very well.

Static Websites on queil.net

Hot-reloading with busybox httpd

Intro ¶

Need for Blog