Question

I have this code (https://gist.github.com/2402116) :

server.get('/', function(request, response) {
 var k = fs.readFileSync('./index.html','utf8');
 response.send( k );
});

Tries to read this file:

https://gist.github.com/2402070

and the browser keeps loading and never end.

But if I remove all the js includes from the html file works fine.

what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your current server implementation does not do anything but serve index.html to requests for the base url, i.e. '/'. You will need to write further code/routes to serve the requests for the js includes in your index.html, i.e. '/app.js' and the various js files in '/js/'.

Now, the routing implementation in the gist is quite crude and doesn’t support many aspects of url matching. The original code is clearly just demonstrating a concept for a single page site with no resources. You will see it will quickly become burdensome to get your code working as you will effectively have to write a route for every resource request, e.g.

server.get('/app.js', function(request, response) {
  var k = fs.readFileSync('./app.js','utf8');
  response.send( k );
});

server.get('/js/jquery-1.7.2.js', function(request, response) {
  var k = fs.readFileSync('./js/jquery-1.7.2.js','utf8');
  response.send( k );
});

etc...

You are better off looking at a node.js url routing library already out there (e.g. director) or a web framework such as express which has inbuilt support for routing (and static file serving).