Make a simple HTTP Server with Node in 6 Steps

Note: This post was originally written for Twitter
^ You can find the original here

1. Initialize the project

Follow the prompts from this command

touch index.js

npm init

2. The basics

Here is the basic layout of the server

// Import the HTTP module
const http = require('http')

// Make our HTTP server
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    res.write('hello world')
    res.end()
})

// Have the server listen on port 9000
server.listen(9000)

3. Routing

Routing can be done by importing the builtin URL Module and parsing the request URL. Then, we compare the request URL to the URL for the route

// Import the HTTP module
const http = require("http");
// Import the URL module
const url = require("url");

// Make our HTTP server
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    // Parse the request url
    const reqUrl = url.parse(req.url).pathname
    if(reqUrl == "/") {
        res.write("you're boring")
        res.end()
    }
    else if(reqUrl == "/hello") {
        res.write("hello world")
        res.end()
    }
})
// Have the server listen on port 9000
server.listen(9000)

4. Methods

Similar to routes, we can check the method of the request and compare it the expected result

// Import the HTTP module
const http = require("http");
// Import the URL module
const url = require("url");

// Make our HTTP server
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    // Parse the request url
    const reqUrl = url.parse(req.url).pathname
    // Compare our request method
    if (req.method == "GET") {
        if (reqUrl == "/") {
            res.write("you're boring")
            res.end()
        }
    } else if (req.method == "POST") {
        if (reqUrl == "/hello") {
            res.write("hello world")
            res.end()
        }
    }
})
// Have the server listen on port 9000
server.listen(9000)

5. Headers

We can set headers on the response pretty easily using res.setHeader()

// Import the HTTP module
const http = require("http");
// Import the URL module
const url = require("url");

// Make our HTTP server
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    // Set our header
    res.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*")
    // Parse the request url
    const reqUrl = url.parse(req.url).pathname
    // Compare our request method
    if (req.method == "GET") {
        if (reqUrl == "/") {
            res.write("you're boring")
            res.end()
        }
    } else if (req.method == "POST") {
        if (reqUrl == "/hello") {
            res.write("hello world")
            res.end()
        }
    }
})
// Have the server listen on port 9000
server.listen(9000)

6. Request Parameters

We can easily grab our URL based query strings with a little modification

// Import the HTTP module
const http = require("http");
// Import the URL module
const url = require("url");

// Make our HTTP server
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    // Set our header
    res.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*")
    // Parse the request url
    const parsed = url.parse(req.url, true)
    // Get the path from the parsed URL
    const reqUrl = parsed.pathname
    // Compare our request method
    if (req.method == "GET") {
        if (reqUrl == "/") {
            // Send a JSON version of our URL query
            res.write("Hello, you sent\n" +  JSON.stringify(parsed.query))
            res.end()
        }
    } else if (req.method == "POST") {
        if (reqUrl == "/hello") {
            res.write("hello world")
            res.end()
        }
    }
})
// Have the server listen on port 9000
server.listen(9000)

Wrapping things up

I hope you enjoyed the quick tutorial. I did most of the research for this while developing my own HTTP framework, called onlinx, built lightning fast and fully dependency-less. If you have any questions, feel free to comment them. If you are interested in onlinx please let me know. Thank you for reading and goodbye.

Comments

[Médéric Burlet]

I think you could add https it's only few lines of code and you can easily run both at the same time. you can also use mkcert to easily generate certificates for local environments.

you can just do https.createServer()