Overview
Zinc is a small and portable HTTP server. It requires no installation and no configuration. It can even run from a USB stick. Just start it from the command line in the root folder of your web site, et voilà! Plus, it offers logging options that prove useful when debugging a web service.
Typical use cases for zinc are: when you need to prototype a small site locally, and when you want to share a folder on your intranet, and don't want (or can't) install a full Apache/PHP stack.
Zinc runs on all UNIX flavours: Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, etc.
Of course, Zinc is not intended to be used in production. It does not implement all the nifty features you may expect from a "real" server, but only features that are required to prototype and debug a small site locally:
- Support for GET, HEAD, POST, PUT and DELETE verbs
- Connection keep-alive
- Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since mechanism to allow browser side caching
- Chunked transfer encoding
- Response compression (Gzip, Deflate and Brotli)
- Basic automatic MIME type guessing, including determining the charset for text/*
- Server-generated directory listing when browsing a folder with no index file
- CGI (with automatic configuration for PHP and Python)
- Detailed logs
Installation and usage
For more information about installation and usage, please refer to the REAME.md file on the GitHub repository.