Question

I have a standard node.js static file server that I want to use to serve normal html, js, css, and jpg files in the same directory (ie- a typical HTML5 single page app). I would expect that the node server can handle this properly. What I see is different.

The index.html file is served, but then subsequent requests are dropped (ie- they never make it to the server). In my chrome dev tools, I see things like this:

GET http://projectcoho.cloudfoundry.com/css/coho.css  http://projectcoho.cloudfoundry.com/:7
GET http://projectcoho.cloudfoundry.com/sencha-touch/sencha-touch-debug.js  http://projectcoho.cloudfoundry.com/:8
GET http://projectcoho.cloudfoundry.com/coho-debug.js  http://projectcoho.cloudfoundry.com/:8

But, these resources exist on the server and you can reach them if you enter their URL directly. And for these requests, my callback in app.js is never invoked (I can tell this because console.log is never called for these files.

Here is the app.js file:

var path = ".";
var port = process.env.VCAP_APP_PORT || 3000;;

var file = new(static.Server) (path, {
  cache: 600
});

mime.define({
   'text/css': ['css'],
   'text/javascript': ['js'],
   'image/jpeg': ['jpg', 'jpeg']
});

http.createServer(function (request, response) {

    var uri = url.parse(request.url).pathname;
    var filename = libpath.join(path, uri);

    console.log("URI: " + request.url + " , filename: " + filename);

    libpath.exists(filename, function (exists) {
        console.log("Serving " + filename);
        if (!exists) {
            console.log("Not found");
            response.writeHead(404, {
                "Content-Type": "text/plain"
            });
            response.write("404 Not Found\n");
            response.end();
            return;
        }

        if (fs.statSync(filename).isDirectory()) {
            filename += '/index.html';
        }

        var type = mime.lookup(filename);
                file.serveFile(filename, 200, {'content-type' : type}, request, response);
    });
}).listen(port);

What am I missing here?

I am using node v0.6.15

Answer 1

In the end, the answer was that my cache.manifest file was incorrect. The client application was looking for resources in a cache, but the didn’t exist. When I corrected the manifest, things started working.