FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.
Each of these commands will run an ad hoc http static server in your current (or specified) directory, available at http://localhost:8000. Use this power wisely.
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
#Nginx Basics for Ubuntu
Please see http://wiki.nginx.org/Main for more information. See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/how-to-set-up-a-safe-and-secure-web-server/ for a tutorial on how to install Nginx.
##Installation To install, you can install the version which is in the standard Ubuntu repositories but it is normally quite old and will not have the latest security patches. The best way is to update the repositories first:
apt-get update
apt-get install python-software-properties
apt-get upgrade