express-spa
v0.0.2
Published
Static sites are great until you want html5 push state urls. Then they suck because every path besides the index breaks on external entry.
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express-spa 
Static sites are great until you want html5 push state urls. Then they suck because every path besides the index breaks on external entry.
In case that didn't make any sense imagine the following sequence.
- User comes to site (
GET /). - User navigates within the page, and the client app silently changes the url to
/some/page. - User loves the page and shares it with a friend.
- Friend clicks on link (
GET /some/page). - The friend gets an error (404), because the server doesn't know about client-side routing.
With express-spa this is fixed.
Example
var express = require('express')
var spa = require('express-spa')
var app = express()
app.use(spa())All requests for html regardless of path will stream the index html file. The filepath defaults to index.html in the root of the project folder. Absolute paths and paths relative to the project folder are supported.
// project/server/app.js
spa() // project/index.html
spa('views/index.html') // project/views/index.html
spa(__dirname + '/main.html') // project/server/main.htmlRest assured project folder does not mean process.cwd(). It means project folder.
Replacements
You can also pass in an object of replacements. This way you don't need a view rendering engine to inject a couple variables. Rendering with jade can take up to 200ms instead of like 6ms.
<body>
<script>window.VERSION = '$VERSION';</script>
</body>Be careful to avoid unwanted matches.
spa({ '$VERSION': '1.1' })The streamed markup will have the replacement.
<body>
<script>window.VERSION = "1.1"</script>
</body>You can specify both file path and replacements.
spa('filename.html', { key: 'value' })Notes
Install with npm.
$ npm install express-spa --saveFor max performance check out Divshot to serve static sites off a CDN.
License: MIT