NodeJS: Creating a Single Page Web App Development Environment

Whenver I build NodeJS apps, I use nodemon as my server and file watch. Nodemon is simple and easy to use but when it comes to serving a single index.html, I prefer http-server.

Hello http-server

http-server is an NPM package that helps you spin up a server to serve a single HTML file.

Instead of hitting refresh on a URL that looks like this:

It can look like this:

Or like this:

Running a single web page through a server is useful in situations where you're configuring callbacks, allowed web origins or CORS.

Getting Started

Step 1 - Download HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is all you need to get you started.

Step 2 - Install HTTP-SERVER

Download the http-server package using NPM. If you're not familiar with Node, NPM or NVM, read this article.

If you have NPM installed, try this:

npm -i http-server

Step 3 - Start Your Server

http-server is a command-line HTTP server so all it takes is a single command.

cd /path/to/boilerplate/

Start server.

http-server 

Start server on a specific port.

http-server -p 3000

Resources