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
    CSS Circles

    A while back I shared a clever technique for creating triangles with only CSS. Over the past year, I've found CSS triangles incredibly effective, especially when looking to create tooltips or design elements with a likewise pointer pattern. There's another common shape...

  • By
    HTML5’s placeholder Attribute

    HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser;  some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful.  One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements.  The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...

Discussion

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