Lightweight hosting

The scenario

You have something small that needs a URL: an internal dashboard, a demo for a stakeholder, a generated coverage report, a team wiki export, a folder of downloads. Standing up a full web server or a PaaS for that is overkill, and a dev server that dies with your terminal is not hosting.

servd is exactly the middle ground: a single static binary with no runtime dependencies and no config file. Point it at a directory and it serves it correctly — directory indexes, ETag revalidation, gzip/brotli — then optionally keeps serving it in the background.

One command

servd --static=./site --port=8080

On startup servd prints what it resolved, so you can confirm the right folder is live:

servd 0.1.0 listening on 0.0.0.0:8080 (all IPv4 interfaces)
Hosts: unrestricted
  static / -> /you/site

If the output is a single-page app rather than plain files, use --spa so client-side routes fall back to index.html.

Keep it running

For anything people return to, run it detached under the supervisor. It restarts a crashed worker with exponential backoff and is controlled per port:

servd --static=./site --port=8080 --daemon
servd --status --port=8080
servd --stop   --port=8080

--daemon returns only once the worker is actually listening, so it is safe to put in a startup script. See Daemon mode for the restart policy and log rotation.

Put TLS and host filters in front

Expose it as HTTPS and limit which hostnames it answers, so a shared machine does not serve it under unexpected virtual hosts:

servd --static=./site --port=8443 \
  --tls-cert=./fullchain.pem --tls-key=./privkey.pem \
  --host=tools.example.com

Details in TLS and CORS & Host filtering. Host filtering is a routing guard, not authentication — put real auth in front of anything sensitive.

In a container

Because the server is one statically-linked binary, the whole host image can be the binary plus your files:

FROM scratch
COPY --from=build /out/servd /servd
COPY --from=build /out/site /site
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["/servd"]
CMD ["--static=/site", "--port=8080"]

No shell, no package manager, no base-OS patch surface — a few megabytes total.

When to reach for something bigger

If you need virtual hosting for many domains, complex rewrite rules, or traffic-level load balancing, a full reverse proxy is the right tool. For one folder that needs a reliable URL — internally, for a demo, or as a small public page — servd keeps the whole job to a single binary and a couple of flags.