Minimal HTTP Server in Node.js without Framework
2 min readDec 11, 2019
Update: Check out my NodeJS Server without Express article if you are interested in serving static as well as dynamic content.
Following is the code for the HTTP server written in Node.js without using any framework.
// Dependencies
const http = require('http');
const url = require('url');
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');// Container Object
const server = {};// Base Directory - Assuming minimal-http-server
// will be accessed from its own folder.
const baseDir = path.join(__dirname, '../');// Create a server
const httpServer = http.createServer((request, response) => {
const parsedUrl = url.parse(request.url, true);
let pathName = parsedUrl.pathname;
// Get the contentType based on the file extension
const responseContentType = getContentType(pathName); // Set the 'Content-Type' in response header
response.setHeader('Content-Type', responseContentType); fs.readFile(`${baseDir}${pathName}`, (error, data) => {
if (!error) {
response.writeHead(200);
response.end(data);
} else {
console.log(error);
response.writeHead(404);
response.end('404 - File Not Found');
}
});
});// Mime Types
const mimeTypes = {
'.html': 'text/html',
'.jgp': 'image/jpeg',
'.css': 'text/css',
'.js': 'text/javascript',
'.png': 'image/png',
'.ico': 'image/x-icon',
};// Get the content type for a given path
const getContentType = pathName => { // Set the default content type
let contentType = 'application/octet-stream'; // Set the contentType based on mime type
for (var key in mimeTypes) {
if (mimeTypes.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
if (pathName.indexOf(key) > -1) {
contentType = mimeTypes[key];
}
}
}
return contentType;
};
// Main method to be called to start the server.
//'port' defaults to 3000 and 'host' defaults to 127.0.0.1server.init = (port = 3000, host = '127.0.0.1') => {
httpServer.listen(port, () => {
console.log(`\x1b[32m%s\x1b[0m`, `Server is running at http://${host}:${port}`);
});
};module.exports = server;
Place this code in
minimal-http-server/index.js
then import the server in your code
const server = require('./minimal-http-server');
Start the server as follows:
server.init();
The server will start on port 3000. Alternatively, you can specify the port as the first argument and hostname as the second argument to the init() method as shown below:
server.init(4000, 'myserver');
After writing this code, I found a similar code on MDN also.
