I’m working on HTML5 games for the time being. During that I came across a very basic issue. If you want to test your HTML5 game in your local system, well you can’t. At least not directly.
Our aim is not to hack, not now anyway. We just want to test a game. One way to overcome the issue is to create a server in your system itself. That way, the rules of the internet will be followed even if you are opening a file in your system.
… enter localhost…
A localhost is basically just a domain which points to your computer itself. You can create a localhost using many ways. You can use programs like XAMPP and LAMP in Windows and Linux respectively to do this. You can also seek the help of nodejs and install a module called http-server and start a localhost.
But there’s a way more simple and robust trick to create a localhost than all of the above. We are still on the testing phase of our game anyway. Most of you might have Python installed in your system. (If not, install it from here and refresh this page). Python also allows us to run modules just like nodejs and it comes pre-installed with some. http-server is one of them. You can call the module from the command line by passing the argument -m.
The full command is like this:
python -m http.server
Or if you are using Python2.7:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
The port number is by default 8000. You can pass a different port number like this:
python -m http.server 8080
Now the question is, where is the localhost now? Where does it point to? It is wherever you called the python command from. So if you want to run your game on localhost, you might have to run this command from the folder where your main HTML file is located.
That’s it! Enjoy your coding.