I had recently written about using Python’s http package to create a web server for local web development. This works fine, but I was recently made away of an even simpler solution: VS Code’s Live Server extension. This extension, which has just shy of 50 million installs at the time of this writing, adds a button to the bottom right corner of VS Code that allows for the hosting of the current project on a local webserver:
This also automatically opens a tab in my default browser. It supports the same type of live refresh you would expect from anything else, which is what makes it super nice over the Python solution: no more hammering the refresh button constantly to see your changes!
Of course, at the end of the day this is generally only something particularly useful for projects with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For anything framework based, you’ll likely be using npm for running your development server. Given that I have a couple of very simple sites that are all just vanilla content with no framework, though, tools like this can still be fairly helpful.