node-devserver
A simple development server geared towards front-end developers and ADD (Api Driven Development) applications.
What's it for
For ADD applications front-end developers generally have no need for a full stack development environment, so a lot of front-end developers use a combination of a local http instance for static content, and a http proxy that forwards to the back-end.
node-devserver combines these two into one.
How it works
When a request comes in node-devserver will first try to serve the request from the local filesystem, and if unsuccessfull proxy the request to a remote server. For example: let's say we get make a request to http://some.domain.local/a/file.ext
(asuming that some.domain.local
is pointing to our local machine) - node-devserver will try to serve the file from these locations (in order)
root/some.domain.com/a/file.ext
root/domain.com/a/file.ext
root/com/a/file.ext
root/a/file.ext
If none of these work the request will be proxied to a remote server.
Configuration
The node-devserver configuration file is basically an array of middlewares to load (in order). And example configuraton file could look like this:
frontend
module configuration
The frontend
middleware is responsible for serving local files.
The configuration is quite straight forward - arguments
is an array of strings that point out the location(s) where static files are served from.
backend
module configuration
The backend
middleware matches url's to remote servers.
Options are tried in order like this:
- parse
regexp
using XRegExp - match request agains
regexp
and store capture - replace placeholders with captured elements
- proxy request using the
proxy
argument