Basic Node and Express - Serve Static Assets

[ErcDz]

After reading the docs and the FCC explanation, I’m still stuck on the concept of middleware. For example

// accesses __dirname + /public
app.use(express.static(__dirname + "/public"));

// accesses /public + __dirname + /public (?)
app.use("/public", express.static(__dirname + "/public"));

If my comments are correct, why can’t I just write

app.use(express.static("/public" + __dirname + "/public"));

[lasjorg]

Maybe this will help answer it.

Express - Serve Static Assets: Why doesn't the first argument of app.use take the absolute path?

The folder that is given to express.static becomes the base directory. If you do not mount it to /public the path in the HTML file /public/style.css is wrong as it would just be ./style.css (or just style.css). For example, for the file path /public/css/styles.css Using… app.use(express.static('public')); …would give you this path to the file. http://localhost:3000/css/style.css The first argument to app.use is a virtual mount path. For example, we can use static, which is a folder that …

[ErcDz]

@camperextraordinaire

https://yoursite.com/public/index.html

Thank you for your response.

Just to check if I’m understanding correctly, this:

app.use("/public", express.static(__dirname + "/public"));

Could look like this:

https://yoursite.com(“/public”)(__dirname + “/public”)

For example:

app.use("/styles", express.static(__dirname + "/styles"));
// let's say the only file in styles is a css file called cool.css

is

https://yoursite.com/styles/cool.css

Would this be correct?

[camperextraordinaire]

@ErcDz

For example:

app.use("/styles", express.static(__dirname + "/styles"));
// let's say the only file in styles is a css file called cool.css

is

https://yoursite.com/styles/cool.css

Would this be correct?

Yes, that would be correct.