Instant File Server: turn any directory into a webserver with a simple command

Our engineering team has been neck-deep in configuration hell lately. Editing 2000-line Solr configuration files, trying to get Apache Oozie integrated into DataStax Enterprise, Cassandra 1.2 upgrades, and more – and the one thing in common with all of these tasks is the prevalence of enormous XML configuration files.

Having wasted countless hours trying to use tools like SCP and various Sublime Text plugins to try to edit (or hell, even view) the configuration files on our dozens of Linux machines, I finally had a “fuck this shit” moment this week and wrote instant-fileserver, a stand-alone file server that you can start using a single command on any directory on any operating system.

instant-fileserver (ifs) allows you to:

$ npm install -g ifs
$ (ifs is added to your PATH; go anywhere on your system)
$ ifs -help
$ ifs [arguments...]
... starting ifs on 0.0.0.0:1337
Using Instant File Server (IFS) – Video Demo

Fork the ifs source code on Github – we accept pull requests!

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I'm the CTO and founder of Petabridge, where I'm making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, Phobos, and more..