Annyong Turns Any Directory Into A Local File Server

Annyong is a Ruby executable that runs cross-platform and can quickly turn any directory on your computer into a local fileserver. There are a lot of directory-listing and file-listing file scripts out there, but Annyong will start a lightweight web server in any directory of your choosing so all you have to do is point it in the right direction and start it up.

To use Annyong, you need to have Ruby installed on your machine. If you’re running Mac OS X you should have Ruby installed already, but if you’re on another platform and do not you can download Ruby here. Once Ruby is installed, you just need to take three steps from the command line.

  1. Install Annyong by typing gem install annyong
  2. Change to the directory you want to use for file sharing by typing cd and then the path to that directory (e.g. ~/Pictures/Desktop Pictures/)
  3. Finally, run annyong by simply typing annyong. If you’re on a Mac you may find that Ruby isn’t set up to run Ruby executables properly, so you may need to type something along the lines of ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin/annyong instead.

Once you follow those steps, you can go to http://0.0.0.0:9292 and you’ll see the listing of your directory. This will only show up on your local network unless you set up port forwarding on your router to allow access to the outside world. Annyong is probably not all that useful at home without doing that, but if you need to easily share a directory at work on the local network it can be a handy little piece of software.

Annyong [via One Thing Well]


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