Node itself can serve static files without express or any other module..?

Question

I am beginner in the field of node js.No idea how to send simple request from url Like :- http://localhost:9999/xyz/inde.html my file hierarchy is

server.js
xyz         


        

Answer 1

I don't agree with the assertion in the accepted answer:

"It's ridiculous to attempt to create a node application without npm dependencies"

as having zero dependencies allows you to deploy an app to a system that runs node by just copying the javascript file(s), and without running npm install.

An example of when I found this useful in real life was writing a public API to compute the amount of income tax a business needs to withold from an employee's pay. You can read all about this fascinating topic here but in essence I had an api that was passed a gross income and returned how that gross income should be split between net income and tax.

I did this with one solitary index.js file, no package.json, and need to npm install:

index.js:

http = require('http');
url = require('url');
const port = 80; // make this a number over 1024 if you want to run `node` not run `sudo node` 
const debug = true;
const httpServer = http.createServer((request, response) => {
  response.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
  const parsedUrl = url.parse(request.url, true);
  let pathName = parsedUrl.pathname;
  if (pathName==='/favicon.ico') {
    // chrome calls this to get an icon to display in the tab. I want to ignore these request. They only happen when testing in a browser,
    // not when this api is called in production by a non-browser.
    if (debug) console.log('Browser requested favicon.ico')
    response.end();
    
  } else {
    if (debug) console.log('Request on path ' + pathName);
    const elements = pathName.split('/');
    if (elements.length == 3 && elements[0] === '' &&  elements[1]==='witholdcalc') {
      const grossString = elements[2];
      const gross = Number.parseInt(grossString);
      if (isNaN(gross)) {
        response.writeHead(400).end(JSON.stringify({error:'Gross salary must be an integer. found: ' + grossString}));
      } else {
        /*
         * The computation of the amount to withold is more complicated that this, but it could still be hard coded here:
         * For simplicity, I will compute in one line:
         */
        const withold = Math.floor((gross<1000)?0:((gross-1000)*.2));
        response.writeHead(200).end(JSON.stringify({net: (gross-withold), withold: withold, elements:(debug?elements:undefined)}));
      }
    } else {
      if (debug) console.log('Invalid path was: ' + pathName,elements);
      response.writeHead(404).end();
    }
  }
});
httpServer.listen(port), () => {
  console.log(`PAYG listening at http://localhost:${port}`)
}

I then could execute sudo node install.js on my linux computer, and in a browser, hit http://localhost/witholdcalc/6000, and it would return {"net":5000,"withold":1000} when debug is set to false.