How to Fetch Images from Node Server ?

Last Updated : 07 Jan, 2025

The images, CSS files, JavaScript files, and other files that the client downloads from the server are known as static files. These static files can be fetched with the use of the express framework and without the use of it. The methods that can be used to serve static files are discussed below. The image to be accessed (geeksforgeeks.png) is placed inside the images folder, as shown in the directory tree below:

Project Structure:

We will discuss the following approaches to fetch images from Node server:

Table of Content

Using the Express framework

Using the Express framework its built-in middleware function express.static() can be used to serve static files.

Syntax:

express.static(root, [options])

Parameters:

This method accepts two parameters as mentioned above and described below:

root: It specifies the directory from which the static files are to be served. Basically, all the static files reside in the public directory.
options: It is used to specify other options which you can read more about here.

Example: The following code is an example of how to get an image or other static files from the node server.

Node

// Requiring module const express = require('express');  // Creating express object const app = express();  // Defining port number const PORT = 3000;  // Function to serve all static files // inside public directory. app.use(express.static('public')); app.use('/images', express.static('images'));  // Server setup app.listen(PORT, () => {     console.log(`Running server on PORT ${PORT}...`); })

Steps to run the program:

node server.js

Output: Open any browser and to go http://localhost:3000/images/geeksforgeeks.png and you will see the following output:

The output of the above command

Without the Express Framework

To serve static files using the fundamentals of Node.js, we can follow these steps:

Parse the incoming HTTP request, to know the requested path.
Check if the path exists to respond to status as success or not found (optional).
Get the extension of the file to set content-type.
Serve the content-type in the header and serve the requested file in response.

Example: The following code is an example of how to get an image or other static files from the node server.

Node

// Requiring modules const http = require("http"); const fs = require("fs"); const path = require("path"); const url = require("url");  // Creating server to accept request http.createServer((req, res) => {      // Parsing the URL     const request = url.parse(req.url, true);      // Extracting the path of file     const action = request.pathname;      // Path Refinements     const filePath = path.join(__dirname,         action).split("%20").join(" ");      // Checking if the path exists     fs.exists(filePath, function (exists) {          if (!exists) {             res.writeHead(404, {                 "Content-Type": "text/plain"             });             res.end("404 Not Found");             return;         }          // Extracting file extension         const ext = path.extname(action);          // Setting default Content-Type         const contentType = "text/plain";          // Checking if the extension of         // image is '.png'         if (ext === ".png") {             contentType = "image/png";         }          // Setting the headers         res.writeHead(200, {             "Content-Type": contentType         });          // Reading the file         fs.readFile(filePath,             function (err, content) {                 // Serving the image                 res.end(content);             });     }); })      // Listening to the PORT: 3000     .listen(3000, "127.0.0.1");