Improve this page

What is public Dir?

Code example

Generally what happens is that in any standard web server of java or php there is a public folder and that contains your images, css, JavaScript’s basically anything that you want freely visible to your clients. For that there is a provision here, in the program directory you need to create a folder named public. There is nothing special in that name, the name can be anything. Since you are going to keep public data so for convenience we name dir as public.

Now in your applicatin you need to write:

app.use(exp.static(__dirname+"/public"));

Meaning of static is that all your static info like static html, images, css, etc we are going to keep in a folder which is under directory named public.

static is an express middleware. There are other express middleware like bodyparser (a 3rd party library which is used to get details from post request), express-session (used to manage the session beyond one request-response cycle). All the template engines are middleware too.

Example:

var exp = require("express");

var app = exp();

app.use(exp.static(__dirname+"/public"));

var port = process.env.PORT || 4000;

app.listen(port, function(){
	console.log("Server is listening on port "+port);
});

And now when I enter the url as : http://localhost:4000/image.jpg then I’ll get the image that is kept inside public folder with name image.jpg.

Now lets create a file with name : index.html. This is a very special name. You just place this file in public folder. And whenever you access the localhost:4000 then automatically you will get to see this index.html page. So the speciality with the public folder is that if you have a file named index.html within that folder then anybody who is accessing your application without specifying any path(accessing it using the url and port number) then that index.html is returned to the browser.

Back

Next