Question

I got two problem

I’m quite new to node.js i worked through some tutorials .
All tutorials are talking about generating dynamic HTMl.
But isn’t there a way to return a “normal” HTML file ?

Or do I have to read read it via fs and return the readed content ?

Answer 1

My suggestion is to use express. It makes this stuff easy.

If you want to render an HTML file after doing some server logic in a specific route you can always name your html file .ejs and use this.

res.render("normalhtml.ejs")

You can even tell express to make it read .ejs files as .html files.

app.set('view engine', 'html');
app.register(".html", require( "ejs" ) 
res.render("normalhtml.html")

But you probably just want a place to put static html files. In that case use the connect-static middleware people spoke about. It’s built-in to express.

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

Anything in the public folder will then be accessible after the / so index.html would be accessible at / or /index.html for example.

For more info see:
http://expressjs.com/guide.html