Question

Is it possible to tell the difference between a request coming directly from a URL in a browser vs. a resource being called from a remote web page?

For example, I would like to serve a web page when someone visits my URL directly (types in http://mywebsite.com) in a web browser, but when a user calls a resource on my app via a url from a seperate domain (like <img src='http://mywebsite.com' />) then I’d like to serve different content.

I’ve looked in the request and in the headers but it looks the same regardless of

Answer 1

I think you are looking for the referer string in the request.header.

So the simple version would look like this:

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  var ref = req.headers.referer;

  if(ref) {
    // serve special content
  }
  else {
    // serve regular homepage
  }
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

---

edited the answer to reflect the input from anu below – it should be referer