Crankshaft

a minimal, Go high-performance HTTP static file server with RAM caching.

loads your entire site into memory on startup, serves it from RAM (for speed on static sites)

usage

Default:
./crankshaft
(serves site/, on port 80. on all addresses)
Arguements:
--port (Select with port to serve on) Default: 80
--bind (which address to serve on) Default: 0.0.0.0
--serve (select which folder or file to serve) Default ./site
Examples:
# serve a specific directory on a custom port and address
./crankshaft --port 8080 --bind 127.0.0.1 --serve ./my-site

# serve a single file
./crankshaft --port 8080 --serve ./index.html

how it works

1. on startup, walks the serve directory and loads every file into RAM (under 50mb)
2. files are stored in a map[string]*cacheEntry with their content, content-type, and a pre-compressed gzip variant
3. a background goroutine runs to watch for file changes and updates the cache instantly

building

go build -o crankshaft .

requires Go 1.26+ and fsnotify.

performance

by serving from RAM instead of disk, you eliminate:

• disk i/o latency on every request
• kernel context switches for file reads
• filesystem metadata lookups pre-compression means gzip is done once at load time, not per-request. This is GREAT for slow disks, or/and slow CPUs.

license

MIT