Bundle files into a redbean zip archive

redbean is a zip file that contains a webserver that runs on macOS, Windows, Linux and a few other operating systems. You download an executable that’s also a zip archive, and it’ll serve any files you add to the archive.

There’s extensive documentation on the redbean API, but less on how to actually do things with a zip archive. Here’s a brief guide to getting up and running on macOS:

First, download the latest redbean release and make it executable:

curl https://redbean.dev/redbean-latest.com >redbean.com
chmod +x redbean.com

Running the binary with ./redbean.com starts a web server on port 8080. If you visit http://localhost:8080 in your browser, you’ll see a directory listing of all the files in the zip archive.

From the command line, you can see that same list of files with the unzip command. The Z flag tells it to print info instead of extracting the archive, and the 1 flag tells it to only print filenames.

unzip -Z1 redbean.com

There are a bunch of files in /usr/share related to time zones and SSL. If you want to ignore these, you can add -x "usr/*" to your command:

unzip -Z1 redbean.com -x "usr/*"

redbean comes with a bunch of standard files (such as help.txt, which contains the documentation) that you might not want in your actual server. You can remove files with zip -d:

zip -d redbean.com help.txt

If you want to make things a little easier, you can use fzf to make a nice interactive terminal app. Here’s a command that will list all the files in the redbean archive, let you select one or more with your arrow keys and then delete them:

unzip -Z1 redbean.com -x "usr/*" | fzf -m | xargs -I{} zip -d redbean.com {}

There are a bunch of examples in the redbean documentation about adding files to the archive. The most useful is probably adding the contents of an entire directory:

zip -r -j redbean.com src/.

Context switching to add files and restart redbean after every change is annoying. The entr utility can automatically re-run a command every time it detects files change. This loop will zip a directory into redbean, run the server and re-zip and restart whenever you add or change a file:

while true; do
  find src -print | entr -ddr sh -c "zip -r -j redbean.com src/. && ./redbean.com"
  [[ $? -eq 0 ]] && break
done