Oftentimes when I’m prototyping a website or just want to tinker I’ll launch a quick local server through the terminal with the following:

cd ~/Sites/MyWebsite
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

You can then access the website at http://localhost:8000.

OS X Mavericks shipped with PHP 5.4 which introduced a handy built-in web server. You can start a PHP server with the following command (hat tip @davatron5000):

cd ~/Sites/MyWebsite
php -S localhost:8000

Keep in mind this isn’t a full-featured PHP web server with .htaccess support or MySQL, but you can plop in <?php include("header.php"); ?> and that sort of thing. It’s perfect for testing and situations where you need to fire up a quick demo.

I find myself using this feature nearly every day so I created an alias for it. You can do this by adding alias srv='php -S localhost:8000 to your .bash_profile. This way you can simply type srv to fire up the server. Many times I’ll have multiple projects open and need to start a server on a different port so I also have the following function in my .bash_profile:

function serve {
    php -S localhost:$@ | 
    open -a "Google Chrome" http://localhost:$@
}

Then you can, for example, type serve 8888 in the terminal and this will start a server and also launch a chrome window at http://localhost:8888.