Requests & Responses

Now that you can create a basic server, let's learn to handle different routes and serve dynamic content.

Routing Requests

A real server needs to respond differently based on the URL:

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

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html');

    let path = './views/';
    switch (req.url) {
        case '/':
            path += 'index.html';
            res.statusCode = 200;
            break;
        case '/about':
            path += 'about.html';
            res.statusCode = 200;
            break;
        default:
            path += '404.html';
            res.statusCode = 404;
            break;
    }

    // Read and serve the HTML file
    fs.readFile(path, (err, data) => {
        if (err) {
            console.log(err);
            res.end();
        } else {
            res.end(data);
        }
    });
});

server.listen(3000);

Status Codes

HTTP status codes tell the browser what happened:

• 200 — OK (success)
• 301 — Moved permanently (redirect)
• 404 — Not found
• 500 — Internal server error

Redirects

You can redirect users from old URLs to new ones:

case '/about-us':
    res.statusCode = 301;
    res.setHeader('Location', '/about');
    res.end();
    break;

This tells the browser: "This page has moved permanently to /about."