I recently was volunteering for a company to help out with some development in my free time. They had me run some scripts to prepare for the development. All of their development is through Docker. I ran the scripts and hit http://localhost and got the website just fine. However, even after I quit all running containers, quit docker, restarted the computer, and used incognito http://localhost still shows their website. My understanding was that you had to have a server running to serve localhost but I don't believe anything is running given everything I did. Is there somehow a way to serve a default page for localhost without a server? For example, maybe change some files to serve some HTML content and js by default? For context, I'm using a Mac and I couldn't find any questions similar to this. Any information would be helpful! Please be specific about which details to share if you don't think this is detailed enough.
Additional Info: For more information, I was able to find two processes running on port 80 thanks to the comment. I tried stopping apachectl which didn't work. "/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist: Could not find a specified service" I found out info using sudo launchctl list | grep PID_num and it came back with "198 0 homebrew.mxcl.haproxy" which must be what's serving it. Every time I kill the processes running on port 80 it just comes back with a new PID immediately. This post was relatively helpful Killing an unknown self restarting server on port 80 Mac OSX. However, I couldn't stop apachectl or delete them so the page is still being served on port 80. I just now know it's ha.proxy.
I read this on the haproxy documentation "-sf/-st [pid ]* finishes/terminates old pids." and I tried running "haproxy -st 5039" where 5039 was the PID number and nothing happened.
I read this https://superuser.com/questions/159486/how-to-kill-process-in-mac-os-x-and-not-have-it-restart-on-its-own and ran this command which finally killed it. launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.haproxy.plist
However, it came back with another command started by "Google" on port 80.... Not sure how to get rid of this one.
sudo lsof -i :80 | grep LISTEN
and see if it shows something listening for (& serving) http connections. There's some more useful info here: "Killing an unknown self restarting server on port 80 Mac OSX".