Python http.server for a CORS world

Python has a tool to serve static content over HTTP. It has had for a long time. You can call it via python -m http.server 8080. It is a handy tool that can help on countless occasions, to easily share a folder over a local network or to perform a quick test of how some HTML pages look in a browser.

Recently I’ve used it for something more unusual: mocking a REST API. I created the path by making the folder tree and the last segment was a file without extension and containing the JSON response. Fine. But it didn’t work because of CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

What I needed was a CORS-compliant version of http.server, properly replying to OPTIONS requests made by the browser. So here it is, the code speaks for itself.

I hope it helps. Thanks for reading.