So you got another Android phone as a gift these holidays and do not know what to do with the old one? You can give it away to someone who might appreciate the old phone or you can re-use it as a local web server. Such a web server can be used for experimenting, hosting your music or video files, or some other documents that you have to look for frequently. You can also show off your technical skills to your friends by making your old phone into a wireless web server.
The first thing you would need for this is obviously an old Android phone. Since the phone is being turned into a web server and generally, web servers with higher storage capacity are desired, you may want to increase the phone storage by adding a high capacity micro SD card. If the phone supports OTG, then you can attach a USB key or even a portable HDD or SSD to it giving a huge amount of web space.
The second step is to install a web server app on your Android phone. The easiest to setup and fastest in performance web server for Android is PAW. You can get it from Google Playstore for free. After the installation, you can open the app and touch on the play icon to start the server.
If you want to change the web server path for storing your website files, then you can find or change it from the app settings. The PAW server comes with many other advanced settings like allowing secure SSL protocol, changing server port (by default it is 8080), and allowing access of the web server via PageKite. If you access it via any other computer using the server address displayed in the PAW app, it opens up PAW server admin interface with all the options to control the server as well as your phone.
The default webpage files location is in the /paw/html/ directory of your SD card. You can copy your web site files there and try accessing the server again then it will display your own website. With the basic settings of the server, you can only create static webpages, but there are options to install PHP plugins and use PHP server side scripts too.
You can get the PAW web server for Android from http://paw-android.fun2code.de/.