send

Send is Connect's static() extracted for generalized use, a streaming static file server supporting partial responses (Ranges), conditional-GET negotiation, high test coverage, and granular events which may be leveraged to take appropriate actions in your application or framework.

Installation

$ npm install send

Examples

Small:

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

var app = http.createServer(function(req, res){
  send(req, req.url).pipe(res);
}).listen(3000);

Serving from a root directory with custom error-handling:

var http = require('http');
var send = require('send');
var url = require('url');

var app = http.createServer(function(req, res){
  // your custom error-handling logic:
  function error(err) {
    res.statusCode = err.status || 500;
    res.end(err.message);
  }

  // your custom headers
  function headers(res, path, stat) {
    // serve all files for download
    res.setHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment');
  }

  // your custom directory handling logic:
  function redirect() {
    res.statusCode = 301;
    res.setHeader('Location', req.url + '/');
    res.end('Redirecting to ' + req.url + '/');
  }

  // transfer arbitrary files from within
  // /www/example.com/public/*
  send(req, url.parse(req.url).pathname, {root: '/www/example.com/public'})
  .on('error', error)
  .on('directory', redirect)
  .on('headers', headers)
  .pipe(res);
}).listen(3000);

API

Options

etag

Enable or disable etag generation, defaults to true.

dotfiles

Set how "dotfiles" are treated when encountered. A dotfile is a file or directory that begins with a dot ("."). Note this check is done on the path itself without checking if the path actually exists on the disk. If root is specified, only the dotfiles above the root are checked (i.e. the root itself can be within a dotfile when when set to "deny").

The default value is 'ignore'.

• 'allow' No special treatment for dotfiles.
• 'deny' Send a 403 for any request for a dotfile.
• 'ignore' Pretend like the dotfile does not exist and 404.

extensions

If a given file doesn't exist, try appending one of the given extensions, in the given order. By default, this is disabled (set to false). An example value that will serve extension-less HTML files: ['html', 'htm']. This is skipped if the requested file already has an extension.

index

By default send supports "index.html" files, to disable this set false or to supply a new index pass a string or an array in preferred order.

maxAge

Provide a max-age in milliseconds for http caching, defaults to 0. This can also be a string accepted by the ms module.

root

Serve files relative to path.

Events

• error an error occurred (err)
• directory a directory was requested
• file a file was requested (path, stat)
• headers the headers are about to be set on a file (res, path, stat)
• stream file streaming has started (stream)
• end streaming has completed

Error-handling

By default when no error listeners are present an automatic response will be made, otherwise you have full control over the response, aka you may show a 5xx page etc.

Caching

It does not perform internal caching, you should use a reverse proxy cache such as Varnish for this, or those fancy things called CDNs. If your application is small enough that it would benefit from single-node memory caching, it's small enough that it does not need caching at all ;).

Debugging

To enable debug() instrumentation output export DEBUG:

$ DEBUG=send node app

Running tests

$ npm install
$ npm test

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2012 TJ Holowaychuk <tj@vision-media.ca>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.