I have the following file locations :
file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/scripts (contains all .js files..)
file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/css (contains all .css files..)
file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/images (contains all .jpg/png/etc. files..)
file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/sitename.html
file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/server.js
Inside sitename.html
I load all necessary files as follows for example :
<html>
<head>
<script src="scripts/somefile.js"></script>
</head>
...
</html>
So whenever I open up file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/sitename.html
everything works fine.
However, whenever I try to load file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/sitename.html
via a local Node.js server that I've setup (server file location : file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/server.js
) as follows :
var http = require("http");
var fs = require("fs");
fs.readFile('./sitename.html', function (err, html)
{
if (err) throw err;
http.createServer(function (request,response)
{
// serve site
if (request.url === "/")
{
response.writeHeader(200, {"Content-Type": "text/html"});
response.write(html);
}
response.end();
}).listen(8080);
});
sitename.html
is found and loaded but all the other files that are supposed to load through it fail to load because they're all given the prefix http://localhost:8080/
(http://localhost:8080/scripts/somefile.js
is not a valid file path for example).
It looks like as soon as the server is created (inside http.createServer(.....);
) the context changes and the parent directory now becomes http://localhost:8080/
instead of file:///Users/MyName/Developer/sitename/
which makes sense I guess but is not very helpful when using files that are still stored locally.
How do I work around that? Is the fact that I'm storing server.js
(just for the time being) in the same directory making things even more confusing?
Thanks!
You're able to load the files using the file://
URL because it's a feature of your web browser.
When loading the address http://localhost:8080
you're no longer leveraging the browser's ability to serve the files (you're accessing the Node.js server). The HTML page being served contains relative paths which work in conjunction with the current hostname to load the assets.
There is a multitude of options for serving the assets.
You could serve the files with Node.js:
- Express.js has a module for serving static assets
- Node-static is a module I found with a quick search on npm
Alternatively you could use a web server to serve the files for you. This is likely to be the most performant option. Here is an example of serving static content with nginx.
The easiest solution I found on serving local static files is to use Http-Server.
Its usage is dead simple. After installing it globally
npm install http-server -g
Go to the root directory you want to serve
cd <dir>
http-server
That's it!
The problem is that while you've defined the path for one static resource (sitename.html), you haven't defined the path for all the other static resources it references (e.g. somefile.js). Assuming the following file structure, below contains the server code that handles loading static resources relative to your public directory (www), without using external modules. (partly taken from here)
project/
server/
server.js
dispatcher.js
www/
index.html
js/ (your javascript files)
css/ (your css files)
server.js:
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(handleRequest).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");
var dispatcher = require('./dispatcher.js');
function handleRequest(req, res) {
try {
console.log(req.url);
dispatcher.dispatch(req, res);
} catch(err) {
console.log(err);
}
}
dispatcher.js:
var fs = require('fs');
var path = require('path');
this.dispatch = function(request, response) {
//set the base path so files are served relative to index.html
var basePath = "../www";
var filePath = basePath + request.url;
var contentType = 'text/html';
var extname = path.extname('filePath');
//get right Content-Type
switch (extname) {
case '.js':
contentType = 'text/javascript';
break;
case '.css':
contentType = 'text/css';
break;
}
//default to index.html
if (filePath == basePath + "/") {
filePath = filePath + "index.html";
}
//Write the file to response
fs.readFile(filePath, function(error, content) {
if (error) {
response.writeHead(500);
response.end();
} else {
response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': contentType});
response.end(content, 'utf-8');
}
});
}