Sometimes, we need an ad-hoc, quick-and-dirty way of sharing files with others while maintaining complete control of the data transmission.

We should not store our data on any third-party servers.
The connections established through the network should be point-to-point.

Being supported by virtually every Internet-capable device and from both command-line tools (such as wget and curl) and graphical Web browsers, the HTTP protocol is one of our best bets. Thus, we have compiled a list of command-line HTTP servers that enable rapid file sharing and compare their features.

python3 -m http.server

The Python standard library has a barebones built-in HTTP server. Not recommended for production.

Language: Python

mjpclab/go-http-file-server

Simple command line based HTTP file server to share local file system.

Features:
- Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
- Frontend Features:
  - File Upload
  - File Delete
  - Create Subdirectory
  - Download the Current Directory as an Archive
- HTTP Basic Authentication
- HTTP Range Requests
- HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
- HTTPS
GitHub Stars: 175
Language: Go

mar10/wsgidav

A generic and extendable WebDAV server written in Python and based on WSGI.

Features:
- HTTP Range Requests
GitHub Stars: 640
Language: Python
Multithreaded
WebDAV Server

TheWaWaR/simple-http-server

Features:
- Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy (COEP)
- Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
- Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy (COOP)
- HTTP Basic Authentication
- HTTP Range Requests
- HTTPS
- Frontend Features:
  - File Upload
GitHub Stars: 785
Language: Rust
Multithreaded

http-party/http-server

http-server is a simple, zero-configuration command-line static HTTP server. It is powerful enough for production usage, but it's simple and hackable enough to be used for testing, local development and learning.

Features:
- Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
- HTTP Basic Authentication
- HTTP Range Requests
- HTTPS
GitHub Stars: 12.4k
Language: node.js