Serving Static Files in Express
Serving Static Files in Express
Express has a built-in middleware for serving static files from a directory. For example, suppose you have a public directory that contains files like images, CSS, and HTML.
$ ls -l public/
total 48
-rw-r--r-- 1
ubuntu ubuntu 1666
Mar 12
14
:17
home.css
-rw-r--r--@ 1
ubuntu ubuntu 17092
Mar 12
14
:17
logo.png
$ You can use the express.static middleware to make it possible to access files from this folder via HTTP.
const
express = require
('express'
);
const
app = express();
app.use(express.static('./public'
));
app.listen(3000
);With the above script, you can open http://localhost:3000/home.css in your browser and see the CSS file.
Serving HTML Files
The static middleware is how you can use Express to serve static HTML files. If you have a vanilla HTML file test.html, you can open that file in your browser and the browser will render the HTML.
This means that you can use express.static() to host an entire frontend web app, including JavaScript, CSS, images, and HTML.
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