Add an embedded web server

[pnkfelix]

Every time I want to write a blog post, I have to go look up what way to invoke python http or whatever to get a locally visible preview of my work.

Today I decided to try something different.

[Mark-Simulacrum]

I think we're 90-95% done with migrating to relative urls (thanks to @m-ou-se), which should make file:/// urls work out of the box, I'd hope - I'd rather avoid the extra complexity here if we can, particularly in terms of compile times in CI.

Would file:/// URLs work for you, @pnkfelix?

[m-ou-se]

See #967 and #980 and #981

[pietroalbini]

Yeah, the worry I have with this is the compile time increase, as we're now pulling tokio, hyper and other heavyweight dependencies.

I'm not opposed to including the web server, but it must not cause compile time increases. A way to do that would be to setup the repo as a workspace and add the dependencies only to the server binary crate.

[pnkfelix]

The file approach won’t work for me; I do my development on a distinct box from where I do the preview

I’ll look into the variant that Pietro proposed.

[bjorn3]

Maybe use tiny_http? It is a light weight http server with only a few dependencies. Including dependencies (part of which are probably already used here) it takes 10s to compile in debug mode, 15s in release mode and 7s with cg_clif.

[Mark-Simulacrum]

I have to go look up what way to invoke python http or whatever to get a locally visible preview of my work.

FWIW, if this is the problem, I have no objections to us printing "run python3 -m http.server output/ or open file:///..." or some similar message after running the blog, that seems like an easy change to make and a good improvement regardless.