I run Windows 10 on my work machine and have installed Bash on Windows just for a play around really.

Then came the announcement that Dropbox was dropping the Public folder, which is going to become a regular private folder. I use the fact that Dropbox serves any HTML content within that Public folder to run a link directory type HTML page with all the links I need for work. As it relies on Javascript and CSS files also present in the folder, I can’t just open the page from my local Dropbox folder in Chrome or Firefox because of the security settings. And I want it to somewhat look pretty all the same.

Now I was looking at a lightweight HTML web server to run on my laptop to serve the page and because I have dabbled in python, I knew about SimpleHTTPServer but having to install python on the laptop just for that was annoying until I remembered that a) Bash on Windows would already have python installed, b) Bash on Windows can access local files while you can run bash commands from Windows as well…

So I decided to have a bash command running at startup launching python SimpleHTTPServer from within my Dropbox Public folder.

Running python SimpleHTTPServer from Bash on Windows serving the Dropbox Public folder content

cd /mnt/c/users/mat/Dropbox/Public
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8600 2>&1 > /dev/null

suppressing the output is a must in order for the batch windows not to stay open when you start the webserver from Windows

I saved this code into a bash file at ~/httpweb.sh as

#!/bin/bash
cd /mnt/c/Users/Mat/Dropbox/Public
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8600 > /dev/null 2>&1

Running the command from Windows

bash -c "~/httpweb.sh"

I saved this code into a batch file called startHTTPWeb.bat as

@echo off
start bash -c "~/httpweb.sh"

Getting the code to run at startup

I copied the bat file from above into Windows Startup folder and the easiest way to find the folder is to run the command shell:startup.

Update

It turns out that by doing the above, the batch windows still needs to be open for the web server to be available, which takes up screen real estate. So my second attempt was to convert my .bat script to a Visual Basic script and create a Windows schedule task to start at LOGON and call the .vbs file, which works perfectly and as expected (as in without Command Prompt window lurking about).

Content of startHTTPWeb.vbs

set ws=wscript.createobject("wscript.shell")
ws.run "C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe -c '/home/mathieu/httpweb.sh'",0