Render raw HTML

Question

I want to render raw .html pages using Express 3 as follows:

server.get(\'/\', function(req, res) {
    res.render(\'login.html\');
}
         


        

Answer 1

I wanted to do this because I'm creating a boilerplate NodeJS server that I don't want tied to a view engine. For this purpose it's useful to have a placeholder rendering engine which simply returns the (html) file content.

Here's what I came up with:

//htmlrenderer.js

'use strict';

var fs = require('fs'); // for reading files from the file system

exports.renderHtml = function (filePath, options, callback) { // define the template engine
    fs.readFile(filePath, function (err, content) {
        if (err) return callback(new Error(err));
        var rendered = content.toString();
        // Do any processing here...
        return callback(null, rendered);
    });
};

To use it:

app.engine('html', htmlRenderer.renderHtml);
app.set('view engine', 'html');

Source: http://expressjs.com/en/advanced/developing-template-engines.html

Comments and constructive feedback are welcome!