How can I include css files using node, express, and ejs?

1.Create a new folder named 'public' if none exists.

2.Create a new folder named 'css' under the newly created 'public' folder

3.create your css file under the public/css path

4.On your html link css i.e <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/style.css">

// note the href uses a slash(/) before and you do not need to include the 'public'

5.On your app.js include : app.use(express.static('public'));

Boom.It works!!

Use this in your server.js file

app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));

and add css like

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" />

dont need / before css like

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/style.css" />

The custom style sheets that we have are static pages in our local file system. In order for server to serve static files, we have to use,

app.use(express.static("public"));

where,

public is a folder we have to create inside our root directory and it must have other folders like css, images.. etc

The directory structure would look like :

Then in your html file, refer to the style.css as

<link type="text/css" href="css/styles.css" rel="stylesheet">

For NodeJS I would get the file name from the res.url, write the header for the file by getting the extension of the file with path.extname, create a read stream for the file, and pipe the response.

const http = require('http');
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    let filePath = path.join(
        __dirname,
        "public",
        req.url === "/" ? "index.html" : req.url
    );

    let extName = path.extname(filePath);
    let contentType = 'text/html';

    switch (extName) {
        case '.css':
            contentType = 'text/css';
            break;
        case '.js':
            contentType = 'text/javascript';
            break;
        case '.json':
            contentType = 'application/json';
            break;
        case '.png':
            contentType = 'image/png';
            break;
        case '.jpg':
            contentType = 'image/jpg';
            break;
    }

    console.log(`File path: ${filePath}`);
    console.log(`Content-Type: ${contentType}`)

    res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': contentType});

    const readStream = fs.createReadStream(filePath);
    readStream.pipe(res);
});

server.listen(port, (err) => {
    if (err) {
        console.log(`Error: ${err}`)
    } else {
        console.log(`Server listening at port ${port}...`);
    }
});