Question

I have “widgets” which include both client & and server .coffee files (think of client as a Backbone.js model/view and server as the correlating ExpressJS routes), all under the root project:

my-node-expressjs3-project/
  src/
    widget1/
      client/
        app.coffee
      server/
        routes.coffee
    widget2/
      client/
        app.coffee
      server/
        routes.coffee
  app/
    widget1/
      client/
        app.js 
      server/
        routes.js
    widget2/
      client/
        app.js 
      server/
        routes.js
  public/

All .coffee files compile to app/. I am trying to keep the widgets referentially intact, and just allow the client/ folder to be served for “widgets”. Problem 1 – I can’t get it to work. Problem 2 – if 2 widgets contain the same app.js file, they would appear the same under the way I thought to solve the problem:

app.use express['static'](__dirname + '/public')
app.use express['static'](__dirname + '/app/*/client/')

How would I do this?

Answer 1

Regarding problem one, node doesn’t have a built-in way to search a filesystem like this using globbing. If you have non-widgety things in your app directory you will need to filter them out manually, or you can use something like the awesome node-findit package.

Regarding problem two, once you have the list of widgets, you can just mount the static middleware at that subUrl for each widget. The app.use function takes an optional mount path.

var widgetDirs = fs.readdirSync('app');

widgetDirs.forEach(function(widgetDir) {
    app.use(widgetDir, express.static(__dirname + '/app/' + widgetDir + '/client/'));
});