I think the easiest / quickest way to spin up a HTTP server on your local machine is:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server[
^]
It's an npm package -- so you'll need to have node.js and npm (which comes with node.js installation).
So the steps are:
1. (if you don't have node.js) install node.js
2. Install the http-server component globally -- just means you can run it at any time from your console : run the following commnad $ npm install --global http-server
3. run the http-server on any port $ http-server -p 8083
4. Either click the link (shown when you start the http-server) or open a browser and go to http://localhost:8083
That's it!
I use it all the time.
CTRL-C to close the http-server
You can run it from any folder on your machine and that will be the root of the web site.
Nice & easy.