Consider the following scenario: you are developing a Python package on a remote computer without a screen (e.g. an HPC cluster). You are working on Sphinx docs for this package. You build the docs and have some HTML files. How do you view them?

There are essentially two easy ways.

One is to copy over the entire HTML folder to your machine with rsync. But this is annoying as it requires a copy every time you make a change. One additional command: too much work.

Another option is to start an HTTP server on the remote machine where the HTML files live and connect to it via SSH. We can avoid the complexity of Nginx or Apache: Python has such a feature built-in, which is fine for this purpose. From the docs folder, run:

python3 -m http.server 8080 -d build/html

On the machine where you are working, make an SSH tunnel:

ssh -N -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 remote_pc

Then open your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080 and you can view your docs! As long as the http server is running, rebuilding the docs will automatically update them. Just a little thing I found useful in a pinch.