Quick Start Guide

This guide will walk you through the most common use cases for serve in just a few minutes.

Serving a Static Site

Let's start by serving a simple HTML file.

Create a project directory and a sample file.

First, create a new folder for your project and navigate into it:
```
mkdir my-static-site
cd my-static-site
```
Next, create a basic index.html file:
```
echo "<h1>Hello, world!</h1>" > index.html
```
Start the server.

Now, run serve in that directory. The easiest way is with npx:
```
npx serve
```

View your site.

You will see output similar to this, indicating that the server is running:

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                                  │
│   Serving!                                       │
│                                                  │
│   - Local:            http://localhost:3000      │
│   - On Your Network:  http://192.168.1.100:3000  │
│                                                  │
│   Copied local address to clipboard!             │
│                                                  │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000. You should see your "Hello, world!" message. The local address is also automatically copied to your clipboard for convenience.

Serving a Specific Directory

If your files are in a subdirectory, or you want to serve a different directory than your current one, you can pass the path as an argument.

Suppose your project structure looks like this:

my-project/
├── dist/
│   └── index.html
└── package.json

To serve only the contents of the dist folder, you would run:

serve dist

The server will now treat the dist folder as the root directory.

Serving a Single-Page Application (SPA)

Single-page applications often use client-side routing, which requires all paths (like /about or /contact) to be handled by the index.html file. serve makes this easy with the --single or -s flag.

serve -s

With this command, any request that would normally result in a 404 Not Found error will instead serve your index.html file, allowing your client-side router to take over.

Stopping the Server

To stop the server, go back to your terminal and press Ctrl+C.