How to serve an image using nodejs

Question

I have a logo that is residing at the public/images/logo.gif. Here is my nodejs code.

http.createServer(function(req, res){
  res.writeHead(200,          


        

Answer 1

I agree with the other posters that eventually, you should use a framework, such as Express.. but first you should also understand how to do something fundamental like this without a library, to really understand what the library abstracts away for you.. The steps are

1. Parse the incoming HTTP request, to see which path the user is asking for
2. Add a pathway in conditional statement for the server to respond to
3. If the image is requested, read the image file from the disk.
4. Serve the image content-type in a header
5. Serve the image contents in the body

The code would look something like this (not tested)

fs = require('fs');
http = require('http');
url = require('url');


http.createServer(function(req, res){
  var request = url.parse(req.url, true);
  var action = request.pathname;

  if (action == '/logo.gif') {
     var img = fs.readFileSync('./logo.gif');
     res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'image/gif' });
     res.end(img, 'binary');
  } else { 
     res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
     res.end('Hello World \n');
  }
}).listen(8080, '127.0.0.1');