Your PC as a live server

A server is a system which serves .html files or .ipynb Jupyter notebooks to a URL in a browser. Your PC can act as a live server for testing/debugging before you finally commit your app to a cloud server for public hosting and viewing. That HTML file can contain/be linked to CSS, JS codes/files, but ultimately its the .html file being served to the localhost:xxxx/ URL in a browser. Similarly a .ipynb notebook can contain python code, html tags, markdown code, etc., but ultimately its the .ipynb file being served to the localhost:xxxx/ URL in a browser.

Serving HTML files

In Sublime Text you can directly right click on an html file you’ve opened on the screen, and then click “Open in Browser”. However I have observed some unexpressed CSS styles when serving site html files of github-pages this way. So for my github-pages site I use the jekyll serve command in the terminal to serve the entire website at once. (I use Alt+1 to launch the terminal within Sublime Text. For a tutorial on it refer here. Apart from this jekyll-based github-page repo, any other repo containing an index.html file can also be served from within Sublime Text. To do this Ctrl+P and go to ‘Package Install’ and install Browser-Sync package. Then go to Preferences-Browse Packages and edit the browser_sync_launch.js file. I found the code was launching a settings file instead of my repo displaying the “Cannot GET /Preferences.sublime-settings” error in the browser. So I replaced with this. Then you simply need to go the Browser Sync button in Sublime & click Launch. Apart from using your PC, you can use the cloud service rawgithack to directly launch the main html file of your Github, BitBucket, Gitlab or Sourcehut repo, without making any local copy at all.

Serving Jupyter Notebooks

They can be launched from Sublime Text using the Helium plugin. But that’s not so popular. Instead Anaconda distribution or Google Colab provide the best way to edit and simultaneously run Jupyter Notebooks in the localhost:xxxx/ URL in a browser.