Python Simple HTTP Server in Virtual Directory

I would do this by using an in-memory sqlite database. You get all of the benefits of a sql database (relations, searchability, etc), but it only exists for the life of the process.

You can use the package libsqlfs which emulates a complete POSIX filesystem, or you can create your own with a couple of simple tables to store directories and files. It depends on just how thoroughly you want to emulate an actual filesystem.

You could use TemporaryDirectory or mkdtemp and make the server serve from that directory. With the first approach, and if used as a context manager, you get automatic cleanup.

Alternatively you could try running everything inside a container system, such as Docker. That way you get isolation of all operations inside the container and it's view of the filesystem, and only allow the modifications you want. It's kind of a heavy weapon to use however.

Here is a snippet of what you could achieve using mkdtemp. It does not remove files if the python process gets killed. Maybe a signal handler could do the job.

import SimpleHTTPServer
import tempfile
import os
import shutil

class CustomHTTPServer():
    pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    tmpdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
    try:
        print "Serving files under %s" % tmpdir
        os.chdir(tmpdir)
        SimpleHTTPServer.test()
    except Exception:
        pass
    finally:
        shutil.rmtree(tmpdir)

which you can just summon using python -m CustomHTTPServer.

You could inherit from SimpleHTTPServer and override the method list_directory and translate_path, but if you really don't mind dumping it to disc, you could make yourself a temporary directory context manager that handles directory deletion with shutil:

from tempfile import mkdtemp
import shutil

class TempDir(object):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.args = args
        self.kwargs = kwargs

    def __enter__(self):
        self.tempdir = mkdtemp(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
        return self.tempdir

    def __exit__(self, *args):
        return shutil.rmtree(self.tempdir)

And then serve it with SimpleHTTPServer.

from SimpleHTTPServer import test
import os

with TempDir(prefix="server") as dirname:
    os.chdir(dirname)
    try:
        test()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pass