I want to run a Javascript/PHP application on my laptop which will at times be unable to get to the internet. Thus I need to run a web server of some sort on it to serve the PHP side of things.
If the laptop is at home on the home LAN I want to be able to run the same Javascript/PHP application on my desktop machine so I can use the bigger screen etc. This will work fine of course with the web server on the laptop, as long as the web server is running.
What's the neatest/easiest way to fire up the web server on demand? I don't really want to run it all the time. Ideally also I'd prefer not to run Apache as it's total overkill for what I'm doing. I tried PHP's built-in web server ("php -S localhost:80") and it works fine for me, the home LAN can't be accessed from outside so security should be OK.
I suppose the modern equivalent of inetd would do what I want but I'm a bit worried about how easy it might be (or not).