NodeJS difficulty serving static content with Express.js

Question

I ran a simple NodeJS and Express server on my Windows 10 development machine

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.use(express.static('app'));
app.use('/bower_components', express.static('bower_components'));

app.listen(3000, function () {
    console.log("Listening on :3000");
});

This works, however when I tried to upload it on my Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) box, only files which are present directly under /app will get served, and nothing from the subfolders.

On the linux machine, I noticed I was running node version v0.10 so I updated to v4.5.0. My windows machine runs v4.4.4.

I had an idea it might be related to permissions, so I tried setting those, but to no avail.

The file structure looks like this

├───api
├───app
│   ├───assets
│   │   ├───css
│   │   └───images
│   └───scripts
│       ├───auth
│       ├───directives
│       ├───filters
│       ├───home
│       ├───i18n
│       └───services
├───bower_components

Have anyone been through the same sort of issue?

When you use chmod and chown on Linux, use the -R flag so that the permissions recurse into the sub directories. — Alex W
– Alex W, Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 19:41
If all of the directory permissions look good, check the permissions of the Node script. — Alex W
– Alex W, Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 19:43

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:00:50Z

1

I think you put everything in files good, so only issue, that can be painfull for nodeJS serving like you want is that path is not specified.

https://expressjs.com/en/starter/static-files.html

If you do app.use(express.static('app')); the dierectory app is injected at / directory (or execution folder of nodeJs installation in extreme case). The only thing that comes to my mind is to add __dirname + '/app' before express.static: app.use(__dirname + '/app', express.static('app'));

__dirname is a nodeJS variable in the module's scope that contains the name of the directory that the currently executing script resides in

If that is changing something try this to match everything: What is the difference between __dirname and ./ in node.js?

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:00

CommunityBot

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answered Sep 1, 2016 at 19:46

Daniel Mizerski

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