portsoc / server101

Several example servers, from the most basic of HTTP capabilities, through doing everything manually, to using express so a package does everything.

Server101

Installation

Install with npm i

Running

The eight examples can be started with npm run s0 through to npm run s7

• npm run s0 — Listens on port 8080 and logs all incoming data (not an HTTP server, but dumps HTTP traffic if you visit it with a browser)

• npm run s1 — A very basic HTTP service that generates and serves a single file when requested from http://localhost:8080/hello-world.txt and returns a 404 for all other requests.

• npm run s2 — An improvement on s1 that moves all responses to a single send function, removing repeated similar code

• npm run s3 — Extends s2, adding the ability to send any file that exists within a web root folder (rather than generating a single hello world message). This program makes use of a files.mjs module that provides a readFile method, which takes care of all the storage access.

• npm run s4 — Extends s3 by reintroducing dynamic content and combines this with also serving static files. When a request is received it is first checked against the dynamic content url, and if there is a match, a function is used to generate the response; but if there's no match, the existing sendFile method is used to respond with a file or a 404.

• npm run s5 — Here we go back to square one, but instead of using the HTTP module, we adopt ExpressJS. This code acts as an HTTP file server and requires just four lines of code.

• npm run s6 — Extends s5 by adding a dynamic route (like s4) - when a request is received to /dyn1/, the server will respond with the current date and time. Requests to other URLs are handled by the static middleware as in s5.

• npm run s7 — Functionally identical to s6 but with comments removed to highlight how little code is actually necessary.