Zinc

Zinc

Version 1.0

Source code on GitHub

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.