# See Franklin site without using a web server

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** package\
**Created:** [October 24, 2021, 8:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306 "2021-10-24T20:49:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nielsls](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nielsls/32/18482_2.png) [@nielsls](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nielsls)\
**Post date:** [October 24, 2021, 8:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306/1 "2021-10-24T20:49:18Z")

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Hey - thanks for the awesome Franklin.jl!

Is it possible to generate a site which can be accessed locally without a webserver - i.e. using just a local URL like file:///C:/Users/foo/bar/index.html.

Currently, it seems a running web server is neccesary to resolve links to assets (.js, .css) and to turn a link such as /menu1/ into menu1/index.html

Thanks!

@tlienart

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**Author:** ![tlienart](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tlienart/32/7640_2.png) [@tlienart](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tlienart)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2021, 6:55am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306/2 "2021-10-25T06:55:30Z")

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Hello @nielsls ; no you need a web server to get everything working properly (\*). Note that the Julia one ([LiveServer.jl](https://github.com/tlienart/LiveServer.jl)) is lightweight and reliable, this takes under 2s to launch on my machine:

```julia
$> julia -O0 -e "import LiveServer as LS; LS.serve(dir=\"__site\", launch_browser=true)"

```

and you could alias that to `serve` or `preview` or something.

(\*) this is not really a Franklin limitation, just how things go to make sure the web browser knows what assets to load etc. You can make standalone HTML pages (e.g. Jupyter notebook to HTML) but that’s typically not what static site generators do as it makes the pages super heavy and messy.

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**Author:** ![nielsls](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nielsls/32/18482_2.png) [@nielsls](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nielsls)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2021, 7:10am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306/3 "2021-10-25T07:10:59Z")

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Ok - thanks for fast response!  
However, depending on Julia (or something else for setting up a web server) is not viable. My usecase is just creating a small set of webpages with some info for my co-workers that they can view locally.  
But no worries - should be fairly easy to do automatic search-and-replace on the generated pages to make them web-server-independent.

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**Author:** ![tlienart](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tlienart/32/7640_2.png) [@tlienart](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tlienart)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2021, 7:21am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306/4 "2021-10-25T07:21:43Z")

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I _think_ that [Weave.jl](https://github.com/JunoLab/Weave.jl) might be closer to what you’re looking for in terms of generating standalone pages.

With respect to your co-workers, wouldn’t it be possible to host the page(s) on some internal server and just point them to that? (if you don’t want to have something public).

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**Author:** ![nielsls](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nielsls/32/18482_2.png) [@nielsls](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nielsls)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2021, 8:57am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306/5 "2021-10-25T08:57:02Z")

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Nope, I definitely want Franklin and its nice templates. Want a “proper” web-site with sidebar, multiple pages etc.  
Was just looking for easy deployment on a shared drive instead of having to involve corporate IT to get access to an internal server (not a big fan of corporate IT…)  
But I’ll find a way - and again - thx for the great work on Franklin!

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**Author:** ![tlienart](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tlienart/32/7640_2.png) [@tlienart](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tlienart)\
**Post date:** [October 25, 2021, 9:03am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/see-franklin-site-without-using-a-web-server/70306/6 "2021-10-25T09:03:22Z")

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haha, I see; well in case your colleagues have python3 installed they can also call `python3 -m http.server 8000` from `__site` and navigate in their browser to `localhost:8000`. This doesn’t require any installation on their parts assuming they have python3 (they might still find that annoying though).