Big list of HTTP static server one-liners
My favourite is thttpd [1] which is super tiny, battle-tested and actually meant for the job (and only this job). It's available as a package on most Linux distros.Serving a static folder `/static` on port `3000` as user `static-user` and with cache headers set to 60 seconds would go like this:  thttpd -D -h 0.0.0.0 -p 3000 -d /static -u static-user -l - -M 60

Even if you've got Python lying around on every Ubuntu server, I still don't get why you wouldn't use something leaner to serve your static files, as long as it's easy to install/configure. Same goes for most of the runtimes in that list.[1] https://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/