There are many times (especially when doing front-end) where we need to launch a local server to serve static files.

With Python

My favourite one is this Python one-liner directly on the console:

python -m SimpleHttpServer

That will launch a local server at 0.0.0.0:8000 serving the files in the current directory.

The cool thing is that this is using a Python standard module, so as long as you have Python in your system (comes pre-installed in Mac OS X and many Linux distros) you are ready to go.

With Node

You can just install globally the http-server package from NPM:

npm install -g http-server

And then running http-server from any directory will statically serve it.