Superstatic

Superstatic is an enhanced static web server that was built to power Divshot.io. It has fantastic support for HTML5 pushState applications as well as clean URLs and other goodies.

Installation

Superstatic should be installed globally using npm:

npm install -g superstatic

Usage

By default, Superstatic will simply serve the current directory on port 3474. This works just like any other static server:

superstatic

You can optionally specify the directory, port and hostname of the server:

superstatic public --port 8080 --host 127.0.0.1

Where it gets interesting is with Superstatic's JSON configuration file.

Configuration

Superstatic reads special configuration from a JSON file (either superstatic.json or divshot.json by default, configurable with -c). This JSON file enables enhanced static server functionality beyond simply serving files.

root: by default, Superstatic will serve the current working directory (or the ancestor of the current directory that contains the configuration json being used). This configuration key specifies a directory relative to the configuration file that should be served. For example, if serving a Jekyll app, this might be set to "_site". A directory passed as an argument into the command line app supercedes this configuration directive.

clean_urls: if true, all .html files will automatically have their extensions dropped. If .html is used at the end of a filename, it will perform a 301 redirect to the same path with .html dropped.

routes: you can specify custom route recognition for your application by supplying an object to the routes key. Use a single star * to replace one URL segment or a double star to replace an arbitrary piece of URLs. This works great for single page apps. An example:

{
  "routes": {
    "app/**":"application.html",
    "projects/*/edit":"projects.html"
  }
}

error_page: the path to the page that you want to render 404 errors if an unrecognized URL is supplied. For example, error.html.

cache_control: by default, all pages served by superstatic have cache control headers set at 1 hour. To change them, you can supply an object containing file globs and ages (in seconds). You can also specify false to indicate that no caching should be performed, and a string to manually set the cache control header. An example:

{
  "cache_control": {
    "nocache/**": false,
    "**/*.html": 600,
    "private/**": "private, max-age=1200"
  }
}

Note that you can pass the --no-cache option when you run the server to serve all content without caching. This is good to use during development when you want fresh content served on each request.

API

Server(options)

var superstatic = require('superstatic');
var Server = superstatic.Server;

var server = superstatic.createServer(/* Server Options */);
// OR
var sever = new Server(/* Server Options */);

server.start(function () {

	// Server started

	server.stop(function () {
  	// Server started
  });
});

Server Options (all values are optional)

port: Port to run the server on. Defaults to 3474

host: Host to run the server on. Defaults to 127.0.0.1 (localhost)

config: override defaults in the configuration file. This can either be a string with the name of the config file (e.g. superstatic.json), or it can be an object containing the values that would normally be in a config file. If an object is passed, it will override any values in the config file.

var Server = require('superstatic').Server;

var server = new Server({
  config: require('config_file.json')
});

// OR

var server = new Server({
  config: 'config_file.json'
});

cwd: the current working directly that you want to serve files from. Defaults to the current directory via process.cwd()

environment: an object containing values that are available to your app with when you add the script <script src="/__/env.js"></script> to your app. See Using Environment Varaiables in Your App

debug: true or false. Enable or disable the output to the console for network requests. Defaults to true

Instance methods

start(callback)

Start the server

callback: gets called once the server starts. Gets passed an error argument if there is an error.

stop(callback)

Stops the server

callback: gets caleld once the server stops. Gets passed an error argument if there is an error.

Run Tests

In superstatic module directory:

npm install
npm test