A simple static page web server using node js

I’m building a SPA using AngularJS, and Chrome doesn’t allow Angular to load the html partials because of cross origin request errors.  Firefox works, but I just prefer to develop using Chrome, so I needed to host the SPA somewhere.  IIS seemed like overkill, so I turned to Node which turned out to be very simple.

1. Assuming you have node and NPM installed, install connect and serve-static with NPM

   $ npm install connect serve-static

2. Create a server.js and place it in the same directory as the entry point of your SPA

   var connect = require('connect'); 
   var serveStatic = require('serve-static');
   connect().use(serveStatic(__dirname)).listen(8080);

3. Start the web server

   $ node server.js

4. Browse to your SPA entry page:

   http://localhost:8080/index.html

 

That’s it!  I really love some things about Node, and the simplicity of setting up a web server is one of those things.