I really like how I can easily share files on a network using the SimpleHTTPServer, but I wish there was an option like "download entire directory". Is there an easy (one liner) way to implement this?
Thanks
There is no one liner which would do it, also what do you mean by "download whole dir" as tar or zip?
Anyway you can follow these steps

Derive a class from SimpleHTTPRequestHandler or may be just copy its code 
Change list_directory method to return a link to "download whole folder"
Change copyfile method so that for your links you zip whole dir and return it
You may cache zip so that you do not zip folder every time, instead see if any file is modified or not

Would be a fun exercise to do :)
Download whole directories in Python SimpleHTTPServer