Basic webserver with node.js and express for serving html file and assets

Question

I\'m making some frontend experiments and I\'d like to have a very basic webserver to quickly start a project and serve the files (one index.html file + some css/js/img files).

Answer 1

Thank you to original posters, but their answers are a bit outdated now. It's very, very simple to do. A basic setup looks like this:

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
const dir = `${__dirname}/public/`;

app.get("/", (req, res) => {
  res.sendFile(dir + "index.html");
});

app.get("/contact", (req, res) => {
  res.sendFile(dir + "contact.html");
});

// Serve a 404 page on all other accessed routes, or redirect to specific page
app.get("*", (req, res) => {
  //   res.sendFile(dir + "404.html");
  //   res.redirect("/");
});

app.listen(3000);

The above example is if you want to serve individual HTML files. If you were serving a single page JS app, this would work.

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
const dir = `${__dirname}/public/`;

app.get("*", (req, res) => {
  res.sendFile(dir + "index.html");
});

app.listen(3000);

If you need to serve other static assets from within a folder, you can add something like this before you start defining the routes:

app.use(express.static('public'))

Let's say you have a js folder inside public like: public/js. You could include any of those files inside of your html files using relative paths. For example, let's say /contact needs a contact.js file. In your contact.html file, you can include the script as easy as:

Building off of that example, you can do the same with css, images etc.

Hope this helps everyone from the future out.