A HTTP file server in 60 lines of code

15 (!) years ago I wrote a post on writing a web server serving files from a directory in a small amount of code in .NET. Revisiting the premise with the current capabilities naturally yields to a smaller footprint, in relying on the very compact form of starting a minimal API server. Another nice reduction of lines of code is the boring mime-type mapping that a class in .NET can now do for us, the FileExtensionContentTypeProvider in the Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles.

Also, I saved myself the url escaping (eg space becoming %20) - the browser these days seems to handle such intricacies just fine.

And here we go:

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