HttpServerHelper

Minimalist wrapper for Node's native HttpServer object.

Features :

• easy setup ;
• transparent event logging ;
• decouple request handling from generic server logic.

This module is good for experimenting and quick prototyping due to its easy setup and rich log output. However it might not be suited when precise configurations, performances, or security are required.

Minimalistic example

var httpServer = require('httpserverhelper').createServer({
  handleRequest: function(pRequest, pResponse) {
    pResponse.end('hello, world');
  }
});
httpServer.start(80);

Output :

http server listening on :::80

If you visit http://localhost/index.html you will get the following kind of output :

http server connection
http request:
{ url: '/index.html',
  method: 'GET',
  httpVersion: '1.1',
  headers:
   { host: 'localhost',
     'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
     accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
     'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/600.8.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.8 Safari/600.8.9',
     'accept-language': 'fr-fr',
     dnt: '1',
     connection: 'keep-alive' } }
http server connection
http request:
{ url: '/favicon.ico',
  method: 'GET',
  httpVersion: '1.1',
  headers:
   { host: 'localhost',
     'accept-encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
     connection: 'keep-alive',
     accept: '*/*',
     'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/600.8.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.8 Safari/600.8.9',
     'accept-language': 'fr-fr',
     referer: 'http://localhost/index.html',
     dnt: '1' } }

Module documentation

Exported methods

createServer([requestHandler])

Creates and returns a new Server object with the given request handler.

requestHandler must provide a function handleRequest which will be called for each request the server receives, with the request and the response being passed as first and second parameter respectively. Request and response are native http.ClientRequest and http.ServerResponse objects respectively.

If requestHandler does not provide a valid handleRequest function a warning message is logged in the console and nothing happens when the server receives a request.

'Server' object documentation

Constructor

Server([requestHandler])

Init a new HTTP server with given request handler. See createServer() above.

Properties

httpServer

The underlying native HttpServer object.

Methods

start([port])

Start the server on specified port. If port is omitted a random port is selected.

Events

listening

Emitted when the server is ready and listening for connections. Event listener is passed the address and port the server is listening to.

Infos

Node.js HTTP module : http://nodejs.org/api/http.html

Contact

Alexandre Bintz [e-mail]
Comments and suggestions are welcome.