I’m working on a prototype using PhoneGap and ran across the awesome PhoneGap Emulator. The emulator lets you run your web app as if you’re in a device simulator/emulator (note however, that it doesn’t emulate the particular device’s rendering engine… it’s always Chrome).
The problem (for me) is that the PhoneGap Emulator assumes your PhoneGap webapp is hosted somewhere. My problem is that my PhoneGap webapp is simply the “www” directory inside of my PhoneGap project.
I could go through the whole process of figuring out how to turn apache on for Mavericks, but that involves mucking with apache and it’s config files. No thanks.
I remembered hearing about Pow from 37 Signals when it first came out awhile back, and thought that might be perfect for this… turns out it is.
Pow can host static sites (like my PhoneGap webapp) as easily as it does ruby/rack apps. The issue is, it wants your site to be in the public directory of your app directory; whereas PhoneGap places it into the www directory.
Install Pow
(~) $ curl get.pow.cx | sh
Add a symbolic link from the www directory to create a public directory:
(~/dev/myphonegapapp) $ ln -s www public
Hook it into Pow:
(~/.pow) $ ln -s ~/dev/myphonegapapp
myphonegapapp to the actual name of the directory)