This Apache Cordova plugin will install a local web server in your iOS app, and will serve the contents of your www directory, looking for an index page of index.html.
After installing the plugin, change the src attribute of your <content> tag in config.xml:
<!-- port can be whatever you want -->
<content src="http://localhost:8088" />
For the local web server to start, the url must be http://localhost, and you can set the port to whatever you want in the url, the local web server will use this as the port automatically. If you set the port to "0", it will select a randomized and free port.
Check your console log for errors in configuration.
In order to limit access to your app, requests are restricted to localhost and are protected with an auth token.
This should effectively restrict access to the server to your app.
However, since requests are made over http, your app's activity may be visible to others on the name wi-fi network.
This plugin is only compatible with the 3.7.0 release of cordova-ios, or greater.
The local web server implementation is from https://github.com/swisspol/GCDWebServer
To update with the latest from that repo:
git remote add GCDWebServer https://github.com/swisspol/GCDWebServer.git
git subtree pull --prefix=src/ios/GCDWebServer --squash GCDWebServer master