Just using caddy server seems a lot simpler...
Neat, I like that when started with no arguments/config it just serves the files in the current directory, but then you can customize it from there.
I have "alias webserver='python -m SimpleHTTPServer'" in my shell config, but I think I'll switch to Caddy.
For local development, consider looking into devd (https://github.com/cortesi/devd). It's a single binary that supports things like livereload, network throttling, routing, and reverse proxying.