Tape - Tape stuff to the Web

Tape is a simple Web server which will serve up a directory of files and do simple proxying. It is quite handy when developing Web applications that do not depend on application servers.

Installation and Dependencies

Tape is built on top of Python and Twisted. It should work on versions of Twisted from 2.5 onward. If you have OS X, you already have both of these.

To install Tape, place the tape executable somewhere in your path.

Using Tape

1. Find a directory you wish to serve.
2. Type tape
3. Browse to [http://localhost:8273] to see the result.

Proxies

One of the best things about Tape is that it will reverse proxy other things easily. This is quite handy for applications which must make AJAX connections because of JavaScript's Same Origin Policy (SOP).

For example, if you are testing a JavaScript XMPP application, you will need to proxy the connection manager like so:

tape -P /xmpp-httpbind=http://localhost:5280/xmpp-httpbind

Now your normal files and your reverse proxies are all taken care of without ever touching Apache or Nginx configuration files!

Configuration Files

Tape allows you to override its configuration in several ways. It will look at things in order, and options set in later steps override previous ones.

1. It checks ~/.taperc
2. It checks .taperc (in the current directory)
3. It checks the configuration file given on the commandline with -c
4. It checks all the command line options

taperc Files

Please see taperc.example to see how taperc files are constructed.

License

This code is copyright (c) 2009 by Jack Moffitt jack@metajack.im and is available under the GPLv3. See LICENSE.txt for details.