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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Dynamic Flickr Image Search with the Dojo Toolkit

    The Dojo Toolkit is a treasure chest of great JavaScript classes.  You can find basic JavaScript functionality classes for AJAX, node manipulation, animations, and the like within Dojo.  You can find elegant, functional UI widgets like DropDown Menus, tabbed interfaces, and form element replacements within...

  • By
    New MooTools Plugin:  ElementFilter

    My new MooTools plugin, ElementFilter, provides a great way for you to allow users to search through the text of any mix of elements. Simply provide a text input box and ElementFilter does the rest of the work. The XHTML I've used a list for this example...

Discussion

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