deliver-or-else
v1.0.0
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Serves local files from the server unto the client in the form of a Promise.
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deliver-or-else
This npm module is used to deliver local files automatically to the client
depending on the URL. If no file can be located in the local file system, it is
possible (through the use of a Promise
) to provide some other logic.
Installation
$ npm install deliver-or-else
Usage
When requiring deliver-or-else, you are given a constructor function:
const Deliver = require('deliver-or-else')
The Deliver
constructor function takes in one parameter (which is required),
denoting the path to the local file system. Only the files in the path you give
in will be available to the end users (the browser clients).
Given that, we can dedicate a single directory (such as the conventional
public/
) to be the one browsers can access:
const path = require('path')
// It is up to you to resolve the document root directory
let deliver = new Deliver(path.join(__dirname, 'public'))
Serving Files
Now that we have a Deliver
instance, we can use it to automatically deliver
files. The directory structure for our files, currently looks like this:
public/
index.html
test.css
test.jpeg
Now to the server:
const http = require('http')
let server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
/**
* The `deliver` method returns a `Promise`, which in turn can be used to
* catch any errors (such as a 404). We could also provide a `then` clause
* for when it works successfully and a file has been delivered.
*/
deliver.deliver(req, res).catch((err) => {
// The err contains information regarding how the `fs.readFile` failed
res.statusCode = 404
res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain')
res.end('404, no such file.')
})
})
server.listen(80, '127.0.0.1', function () {
console.log('Starting server...')
})
With the above structure, if the URL from the browser client is /index.html
,
test.css
or test.jpeg
, it will deliver one of these files, otherwise the
client is presented with a 404, no such file
error page.
Since errors are caught, we could provide some other routing mechanism in the
catch
method's callback. If the css
and jpeg
files were to be in the
html
document, they would be automatically requested from the server.
License
This module, and the code therein, is licensed under MIT.