How to run things locally

Procedural content

If you use just procedural geometries and don't load any textures, webpages should work straight from the file system, just double-click on HTML file in a file manager and it should appear working in the browser (accessed as file:///example).

Content loaded from external files

If you load models or textures from external files, due to browsers' "same origin policy" security restrictions, loading from a file system will fail with a security exception.

There are two ways how to solve this:

1. Change security for local files in a browser (access page as file:///example)

2. Run files from a local server (access page as http://localhost/example)

If you use option 1, be aware that you may open yourself to some vulnerabilities if using the same browser for a regular web surfing. You may want to create a separate browser profile / shortcut used just for local development to be safe.

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Change local files security policy in Chrome

Start Chrome executable with a command line flag:

chrome --allow-file-access-from-files

On Windows, the easiest is probably to create a special shortcut which has added flag (right-click on shortcut -> properties -> target).

Change local files security policy in Firefox

1. Go to about:config
2. Find security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy parameter
3. Set it to false

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Run local server

The simplest probably is to use Python's built-in http server.

If you have Python installed, it should be enough to run this from a command line:

# Python 2.x
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

# Python 3.x
python -m http.server

This will serve files from the current directory at localhost under port 8000:

http://localhost:8000/

If you have Ruby installed, you can get the same result running this instead:

ruby -r webrick -e "s = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => 8000, :DocumentRoot => Dir.pwd); trap('INT') { s.shutdown }; s.start"

PHP also has a built-in web server, starting with php 5.4.0:

php -S localhost:8000

Node.js has a simple HTTP server package. To install:

npm install http-server -g

To run:

http-server .

Other simple alternatives are discussed here on Stack Overflow.

Of course, you can use any other regular full-fledged web server like Apache or nginx.

Example with lighttpd, which is a very lightweight general purpose webserver (on MAC OSX):

1. Install it via homebrew brew install lighttpd
2. Create a configuration file called lighttpd.conf in the directory where you want to run your webserver. There is a sample in this page.
3. In the conf file, change the server.document-root with the directory you want to serve
4. Start it with lighttpd -f lighttpd.conf
5. Navigate to http://localhost:3000/ and it will serve static files from the directory you chose.