Giters

expressjs / serve-favicon

favicon serving middleware

Geek Repo:Geek Repo

Github PK Tool:Github PK Tool

Purpose

ryandesign opened this issue · comments

commented

I've never understood the purpose of this middleware. favicon.ico is a static file, so it would go in your project's static resource directory and could be served by the general purpose static file serving middleware, couldn't it? Why should there be a dedicated middleware to handle this specific static file? The answers to these questions should be added to the readme.

commented

so it would go in your project's static resource directory and could be served by the general purpose static file serving middleware, couldn't it?

Yes, as long as you have it set to serve .ico with the correct content-type.

Why should there be a dedicated middleware to handle this specific static file?

Because it lets you do two things:

  1. You can put it before your access logger like morgan and then you won't log all those requests.
  2. The icon file is very tiny and everything requests it, no matter what URL is accessed on your site. This means caching the icon in memory (like this module does) is extremely efficient compare to read it off your disk (and doing file stats looking for the file) for all these request.

But of course last, this module derrives from old connect days, when all the middlewre, like this favicon one, were just example middleware and not actually strictly necessary.

The module is not necessary as long as you're serving favicon.ico with the correct content-type of image/x-icon from your static stuff and as long as you don't mind every request hitting your disk.

The answers to these questions should be added to the readme.

Feel fee to make a PR :)

commented

Thanks, I understood the logging concerns, but did not realize this module cached the favicon in memory; that wasn't mentioned anywhere.

I've submitted a pull request which I hope accurately conveys your perception of the advantage of this module.

But aren't there other files that would benefit from this same treatment? robots.txt and the miriad apple-touch-icons come to mind.

commented

But aren't there other files that would benefit from this same treatment? robots.txt and the miriad apple-touch-icons come to mind.

Sure, but those are out of the scope of this module and represent a tiny fraction of traffic compared to favicon.ico files--every single browser will request the favicon.ico file; user's browsers don't even request robots.txt and robots won't constantly request it over and over (there are only so many bots in the world) and the apple-touch-icons are only requested by Apple products, which is only ~10% of the usage according to http://gs.statcounter.com/