Development server

elide dev and elide serve serve a directory of files or run a server script.

Terminal

bash

elide dev ./public
elide serve ./dist

Command	Default address	Reload on file change
`elide dev`	`127.0.0.1:3000`	HTML pages, when serving a directory
`elide serve`	`127.0.0.1:8080`	No

A directory starts a file server; a script runs as a program and is not reloaded.

Starting the development server and observing a changed page

 ~/demo  elide dev site --no-tui --port 43765 &
Dev server for directory: "site"
Dev server: site at http://127.0.0.1:43765
 ~/demo  curl -s http://127.0.0.1:43765 | head -2
GET / 200 (164us)
<!doctype html>
<h1>Hello, Ada!</h1>
 ~/demo  sed -i.bak 's/Ada/Grace/' site/index.html
[watch] Create /home/demo/demo/site/sedsHkWQG
 ~/demo  curl -s http://127.0.0.1:43765 | head -2
GET / 200 (112us)
<!doctype html>
<h1>Hello, Grace!</h1>

Flag	Effect
`--host HOST`	Bind host.
`--port PORT`	Bind port.
`--no-tui`	Plain log output instead of the TUI.
`--no-watch`	`dev` only: no watching or reload.
`--contexts=N`	Run `N` copies of the app; `auto` sizes from the CPU cores. Linux only.

Serve a directory

Request	Response
`/`, `/docs`, `/docs/`	The directory’s `index.html`
A directory without `index.html`	`404`; there are no directory listings
`/about` when only `about.html` exists	`404`; link to `about.html`
A dot file such as `/.env`	`404`. `/.well-known/` is served.
A symbolic link that points outside the directory, or `..` in the path	`404`
`POST` and other methods	`405` from `elide serve`; `elide dev` answers as for `GET`

Content-Type comes from the file extension: text/html; charset=utf-8, text/css, text/javascript, application/json, application/wasm, image/png and so on.
Files are sent whole, uncompressed, with no ETag, Last-Modified or Cache-Control; Range and conditional requests get a full 200. Put a CDN or reverse proxy in front for caching and compression.
elide dev adds a reload script to each HTML page and reloads it when any file in the directory changes.

Run a fetch handler

// entrypoint.mjs
export default {
  async fetch(request) {
    return new Response("ok");
  },
};

utf-8 · js · Lines: 6

Terminal

bash

elide serve entrypoint.mjs

elide run entrypoint.mjs also serves, on the exported hostname and port or 127.0.0.1:8080. Elide.serve({ port: 3005, fetch }) uses its own address with every command.

Serve with several contexts

Terminal

bash

elide serve --contexts=4 entrypoint.mjs

Each context runs the entry module once and keeps its own globals, so a request counter counts per context.
A connection stays on one context for its lifetime, including keep-alive requests.
If one context fails, the server stops.

Set engine.contexts in elide.pkl for finer control; see Engine contexts.

Samples

Multi-context server