Why do you want this? Since the devguide is entirely static and uses relative paths you can simply open up the files locally in the browser and have things render properly.

Hi @mlouielu, My typical workflow is to make the docs content build for Sphinx. Next, I run python3 -m http.server to start a web server that will render things locally. Was there an advantage that you felt that make serve would have?

@brettcannon you are right, but some additional function like search will need someone to serve them.

@willingc python -m http.server will need to enter localhost:8000/_build/html in the navigation bar, but make serve will cover this, so you will only need to enter localhost:8000 to it.

Thanks for clarifying @mlouielu. I'm fine with being consistent with the CPython doc build which uses serve. A few thoughts on the PR:

• Let's add a make.bat file modification for Windows such as found in CPython docs
• I believe that you should add serve to the Makefile's .PHONY lines https://github.com/python/devguide/blob/master/Makefile#L17

@mlouielu in 3.7, I have added the support of a directory for python -m http.server with -d for example: python -m http.server -d _build/html/

@mlouielu will you support the serve parameter on unix-like systems ?

Update: this comment is useless, sorry

@willingc I have asked to @mlouielu to add the hostname localhost in the output.

Now for my part, I have tested the target serve of Makefile, and it's a success.

Do you think we could merge it ?

Sure thing. Thanks @mlouielu and @matrixise.