In line with this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/171655/lightweight-web-app-server-for-php

The above question has been asked numerous times and answered exactly the same in all the cases I've found using google. My question is similar to a degree but with a different desired goal: On demand development instances.

I have come up with a somewhat questionable solution to host arbitrary directories in my user account for the purpose of development testing. I am not interested in custom vhosts but looking to emulate the behaviour I get when using paster or mongrel for Python & Ruby respectively.

Ubuntu 9.10 TOXIC@~/ >APACHE_RUN_USER=$USER APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data apache2 -d ~/Desktop/ -c "Listen 2990"

Is there a better solution, could I do something similar with nginix or lighttpd?

Note: The above won't work correctly for stock environments without a copied & altered httpd.conf.

Update: The ideal goal is to mimic Paster, Webbrick, and Mongrel for rapid local development hosting. For those light weight servers, it takes less then a minute to get a working instance running ( not factoring any DB support ). Apache2 vhost is great but I've been using Apache2 for over ten years and it would be some sort of abomination hack to setup a new entry in /etc/hosts unless you have your own DNS, in which case a wildcard subdomain setup would probably work great. EXCEPT one more problem, it's pretty easy for me to know what is being hosted ( ex. by paster or mongeral ) just doing a sudo netstat -tulpn while there would be a good possibility of confusion in figure out which vhost is what.