Express 4: Serve Static Files

Published 2021-03-02 by Cody Freeman

Run npm install express to install Express.

We can use express.static to load a directory of files we want to serve.

app.use(express.static('static-files-folder')) will serve everything in the static-files-folder folder at the root of our IP or domain: localhost:8080/FILE_NAME

const express = require('express');
const http = require('http');

// Environment variables
const PORT = 8080;

// Set up Express application
const app = express();

app.use(express.static('static-files'));

// Create HTTP server
http.createServer(app).listen(PORT, () => {
    console.log(`listening on ${PORT}...`);
});

If we wish to load our static files with a path prefix, we can add it to app.use like so: app.use('/public', express.static('static-files')) this will load the files at localhost:8080/public/FILE_NAME.