This is a continuation of the tutorial started on node js angular and mongo db shown on
node js console tutorial
In order to have simple website that is displaying hello world, we need to have a web server. In the previous example there was no need to have a web server since the message was shown from command line.
Node provides its own web server that we can serve http request and responses.
I will cover on the later tutorial how those would be used, for now. All we need is to be able to go to http://localhost:8080 and see the the output of hello world
Serving the page through web server
If you have followed the above tutorial listed on the link, start from number 3.
1. Create a folder in your computer and name it as node-tutorial
2. In the node-tutorial folder create server.js file
3. On server.js add the following code in it and save it.
var http = require("http");
var server = http.createServer(function (request, response) {
response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type":"text/plain"});
response.end("Hello World");
});
server.listen(8080);
console.log("Something awesome to happen at http://localhost:8080");
4. go to your browser and type http://localhost:8080 and you will see Hello World being printed on your browser.
Congratulations! you have successfully created a website that prints Hello World.
What is going on
The above snippet creates a very basic yet full fledged web server. At the heart of any web server are request and response
request is what the browser behalf of the user is sending to the server and it waits for the server to give it back something to show to the user. The request is the one that contains the form elements usually
response is what the server would be responding based on the request forwarded to the server. It contains usually the type of the response data, like text or json or image through its header and the actual data to be returned.
require("http"); This part tells node to import the http package for usage.
With the hello world example above, the request contains no input fields but it is full request in that it is requesting for the response of hello world.
Don’t worry if you don’t get much of the request response stuff, as it would be clear on the upcoming parts of this tutorial.
Since simply printing Hello Worlds is not that much fun. We will see how to do some other exciting stuffs on the upcoming parts of tutorials.
Next: Accept input from the browser/user and process the input
