I need to get the file type of a file with the help of node.js to set the content type. I know I can easily check the file extension but I've also got files without extension which should have the content type image/png
, text/html
aso.
This is my code (I know it doesn't make much sense but that's the base I need):
var http = require("http"),
fs = require("fs");
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
var data = "";
try {
/*
* Do not use this code!
* It's not async and it has a security issue.
* The code style is also bad.
*/
data = fs.readFileSync("/home/path/to/folder" + req.url);
var type = "???"; // how to get the file type??
res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": type});
} catch(e) {
data = "404 Not Found";
res.writeHead(404, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
}
res.write(data);
res.end();
}).listen(7000);
I haven't found a function for that in the API so I would be happy if anyone can tell me how to do it.
Have a look at the mmmagic module. It is a libmagic binding and seems to do exactly what you want.
There is a helper library for looking up mime types https://github.com/broofa/node-mime
var mime = require('mime');
mime.lookup('/path/to/file.txt'); // => 'text/plain'
But it still uses the extension for lookup though
You should have a look at the command line tool file
(Linux). It attempts to guess the filetype based on the first couple of bytes of the file. You can use child_process.spawn
to run it from within node.
You want to be looking up the mime type, and thankfully node has a handy library just for that:
https://github.com/bentomas/node-mime#readme
edit:
You should probably look into a static asset server and not be setting any of this stuff yourself. You can use express to do this really easily, or there's a whole host of static file modules, e.g. ecstatic. On the other hand you should probably use nginx to serve static files anyway.
I used this:
npm install mime-types
And, inside the code:
var mime = require('mime-types');
tmpImg.contentType = mime.lookup(fileImageTmp);
Where fileImageTmp is the copy of image stored on the file system (in this case tmp).
The result I can see is: image/jpeg
2018 solution
The accepted answer appears to have a Python dependency and the other answers are either out-of-date or presume the file name has some sort of extension.
Please find my more up-to-date answer here