Serve a Directory with Node.js

By  on  

As I mentioned in Serve a Directory with Python, sometimes you need a directory to be "served" instead of loading the file:// location within your browser.  In the past I would mess around with MAMPStack and swapping out httpdocs directories, but there are better tools these days.

If you prefer to use Node.js instead of Python, you can use the http-server package:

# Install via shell
npm install http-server -g

# Serve a directory
http-server

# Serve a directory at a specified port
http-server -p 2020

Check out the http-server NPM page to check out specific options, but I wanted to highlight how easy it can be to serve a directory with Node.js.  And for JavaScript lovers like me...Node.js is the way to go.

Recent Features

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Fixed Position Background Image

    Backgrounds have become an integral part of creating a web 2.0-esque website since gradients have become all the rage. If you think gradient backgrounds are too cliche, maybe a fixed position background would work for you? It does provide a neat inherent effect by...

  • By
    External Site Link Favorite Icons Using MooTools and CSS

    I recently came upon an interesting jQuery article about how you can retrieve all external links within a page, build the address of the site's favorite icon, and place the favorite icon along side the link. I've chosen a different approach which...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!