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Send Static Files in Express with sendFile()

Mar 13, 2020

Express' sendFile() function lets you send a raw file as a response to an HTTP request. You can think of res.sendFile() as Express' static middleware for a single endpoint.

Using `sendFile()`

Suppose you have an HTML file test.html that looks like this:

<h1>Hello, World</h1>

You can make Express serve this HTML file as an HTTP response using res.sendFile() by passing the path to test.html. Note that the path must be absolute unless you specify the root option.

app.get('/myendpoint', (req, res) => {
  res.sendFile(`${__dirname}/test.html`);
});

If you don't want to specify the absolute path, you can pass the root option to specify the directory the path is relative to.

app.get('/myendpoint', (req, res) => {
  res.sendFile('test.html', { root: __dirname });
});

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Send Static Files in Express with sendFile()

Using sendFile()

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Using `sendFile()`