How it works...

The first thing we did was check if Python was installed. The best way to do this is to ask Python for its version number. This way we know whether Python is installed, and if it's new enough for our purposes.

If it's not installed, Python can be retrieved via the OS's package manager, or via the installers made available through Python's website.

Once installed, Python comes with a lot of utilities. The one we are interested in is the appropriately named SimpleHTTPServer. This utility listens for HTTP requests on port 8000, and returns the contents of the files relative to the directory root. If the path points to a directory, it returns an HTML page that lists the directory contents.