Serve an HTML page using Node.js

Aug 16, 2020

Learn how to serve an index.html page using Node.js with no dependencies, using the http module and piping fs.createReadStream() to the response.

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I had the need to serve an HTML page from a Node.js server, and this is the simplest code that does the trick:

const http = require('http')
const fs = require('fs')

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.writeHead(200, { 'content-type': 'text/html' })
  fs.createReadStream('index.html').pipe(res)
})

server.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000)

No dependencies needed.

Add this to an app.js file, then create an index.html page, and run node app.js

Notice that the above code does not provide support for serving static assets, it will just serve the index.html page.

Tagged: Node.js · All topics

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