Accessing Static Files

Lecture 263:- Accessing Static Files

Accessing static files refers to serving files like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and videos to the client from the server. In web development, static files are those files that do not change dynamically, unlike dynamic files that are processed by a server before sending them to the client.

In the context of an Express.js server, serving static files involves using a built-in middleware function express.static() that can be used to serve static files in a directory. This middleware takes a single argument, which is the path of the directory from where static files are to be served.

For example, to serve static files from a directory called public, the following code can be used:

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const express = require('express'); const app = express(); app.use(express.static('public')); app.listen(3000, () => {  console.log('Server started on port 3000'); });

In this code, express.static() is used as a middleware to serve static files from the public directory. The app.use() method is used to mount this middleware to the root path of the server.

Once this middleware is mounted, any file within the public directory can be accessed from the client-side by just providing its path relative to the root directory.

For example, if there is a file style.css inside the public directory, it can be accessed in an HTML file as follows:

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<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">

Here, /style.css refers to the style.css file inside the public directory.