codelog

Lightnode: Lighttpd inspired server for Node.js

thechangelog:

If you’re looking for an easy way to serve static files, handle vhosts, and compose sites from multiple Node.js applications, be sure and check out Lightnode from Tim Lind. Lightnode aims to offer the power of Node.js with the simplicity of Lighttpd or Apache and includes:

• Robust static file serving
• VHost support
• Caching
• Server delegation
• Server subclassing

Here’s a quick example at server delegation, in this case handling API requests separately:

var http = require('http')
var lightnode = require('../lightnode')


// 1 - create and start the node ip server
var server = new http.Server(); server.listen(8081)

// 2 - create the file server for the root directory
var website = new lightnode.FileServer('/home/web/www.ngspinners.com')

// before any requests come in

// the delegateRequest function should just return the lightnode.HttpServer object that must emit (handle) the request, or a function to execute as the request listener.
website.delegateRequest = function(req, resp) {

  // 3 - requests starting with path '/api' are sent to the api server

  if (req.url.indexOf('/api') == 0)
    return apiHandler

  // 4 - serve all other requests with this file server object

  else
    return website

}

// when a request comes to the ip server
server.addListener('request', function(req, resp) {

  // pass all requests to the file server
  website.receiveRequest(req, resp)

})


// this is run when the given request must be handled by the API
function apiHandler(req, resp) {
  // I'm a hello world API
  var message = 'hello, world.'
  resp.writeHead(200, {
    'content-type': 'text/plain',
    'content-length': message.length
  })
  resp.write(message)
  resp.end()
}

For further reading, check out more examples over on GitHub.

[Source on GitHub]