I’m working on a personal project where I need to spin up a simple web server to serve up some deployable assets. In order to get a low overhead server I’m looking into a NodeJS web server. So I set out to create one. This is the first, and simplest, one I could fine. It gets the job done but I think I probably need something more feature rich. This is as bare bones as it gets. Let’s dig into this.
package.json:
"dependencies": {
"connect": "^3.5.0",
"serve-static": "^1.11.2"
}
This web server, outside of Node, only requires two packages: connect
and serve-static
. Then, I create a server.js
file with the following code:
const connect = require('connect'),
serveStatic = require('serve-static');
const port = '8080';
const location = './dist';
connect().use(serveStatic(location)).listen(port, function() {
console.info('Server running on http://localhost:'+port+'...');
});
In a command prompt that’s navigated to the location where this code is located, type node server.js
and it starts the web browser.
This initializes a simple web server at http://localhost:8080
and then loads up anything loaded in the location
variable. It works, but doesn’t really have any features other than this. So I’ll be looking for a second version of this, but wanted to share this one as it’s super simple and in a pinch can be used to spin up the most basic of web servers.