Express Render HTML

Express makes it easy to render plain HTML, either from a JavaScript string or from a file. Given an HTML string, all you need to do is call res.send(), Express takes care of setting the content-type header for you:

const html = '<h1>Hello, World!</h1>';

const express = require('express');

const app = express();
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
  // That's all you need to do! If you pass a string to `res.send()`,
  // Express sets the response-type header to `text/html`
  res.send(html);
});

const server = await app.listen(3000);

// Example of using the server
const axios = require('axios');

const res = await axios.get('http://localhost:3000');
res.headers['content-type']; // 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
res.data; // '<h1>Hello, World!</h1>'

From a File

If your HTML is in a file test.html, rather than a string, you can use Express' sendFile() function. The only caveat is that you must specify the absolute path to test.html.

app.get('*', (req, res) => {
  // `__dirname` contains the directory that this code is in.
  res.sendFile(`${__dirname}/test.html`);
});

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More Express Tutorials

• Handle POST Form Data with Express JS
• What Does `app.use(express.json())` Do in Express?
• Handling POST Requests with Express
• What Does `app.use(express.static())` Do in Express?
• The `app.get()` Function in Express
• The `app.use()` Function in Express
• Express Template Engines