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Basic static file server in NodeJS

I'm trying to create a static file server in nodejs more as an exercise to understand node than as a perfect server. I'm well aware of projects like Connect and node-static and fully intend to use those libraries for more production-ready code, but I also like to understand the basics of what I'm working with. With that in mind, I've coded up a small server.js:

var http = require('http'),
    url = require('url'),
    path = require('path'),
    fs = require('fs');
var mimeTypes = {
    "html": "text/html",
    "jpeg": "image/jpeg",
    "jpg": "image/jpeg",
    "png": "image/png",
    "js": "text/javascript",
    "css": "text/css"};

http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    var uri = url.parse(req.url).pathname;
    var filename = path.join(process.cwd(), uri);
    path.exists(filename, function(exists) {
        if(!exists) {
            console.log("not exists: " + filename);
            res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
            res.write('404 Not Found\n');
            res.end();
        }
        var mimeType = mimeTypes[path.extname(filename).split(".")[1]];
        res.writeHead(200, mimeType);

        var fileStream = fs.createReadStream(filename);
        fileStream.pipe(res);

    }); //end path.exists
}).listen(1337);

My question is twofold

  1. Is this the "right" way to go about creating and streaming basic html etc in node or is there a better/more elegant/more robust method ?

  2. Is the .pipe() in node basically just doing the following?

.

var fileStream = fs.createReadStream(filename);
fileStream.on('data', function (data) {
    res.write(data);
});
fileStream.on('end', function() {
    res.end();
});

Thanks everyone!

Solution