Loading basic HTML in Node.js

I just found one way using the fs library. I'm not certain if it's the cleanest though.

var http = require('http'),
    fs = require('fs');


fs.readFile('./index.html', function (err, html) {
    if (err) {
        throw err; 
    }       
    http.createServer(function(request, response) {  
        response.writeHeader(200, {"Content-Type": "text/html"});  
        response.write(html);  
        response.end();  
    }).listen(8000);
});

The basic concept is just raw file reading and dumping the contents. Still open to cleaner options, though!

You can echo files manually using the fs object, but I'd recommend using the ExpressJS framework to make your life much easier.

...But if you insist on doing it the hard way:

var http = require('http');
var fs = require('fs');

http.createServer(function(req, res){
    fs.readFile('test.html',function (err, data){
        res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html','Content-Length':data.length});
        res.write(data);
        res.end();
    });
}).listen(8000);

I know this is an old question, but as no one has mentioned it I thought it was worth adding:

If you literally want to serve static content (say an 'about' page, image, css, etc) you can use one of the static content serving modules, for example node-static. (There's others that may be better/worse - try search.npmjs.org.) With a little bit of pre-processing you can then filter dynamic pages from static and send them to the right request handler.

use app.get to get the html file. it's simple!

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

app.get('/', function(request, response){
    response.sendFile('absolutePathToYour/htmlPage.html');
});

its as simple as that. For this use express module. Install express: npm install -g express