How to serve a static file directory with uWS

[JemiloII]

So for this next project I'm doing, I really want to use uWS for https and wss. Most of my projects have the two split unfortunately. This project is much simpler but I don't see how with uWS to serve static content. I don't want to have to make a wildcard and do file lookups. I just want a simple thing like express, where I just do .static(route). I have a couple image directories, audio directory, and an angular build dir I want to make static. Does uWS have a simple way of doing this?

[uNetworkingAB]

No but it could possibly be done at some point, maybe.

[criejs]

Why not using Nginx for static files?

[nickchomey]

Why not cloudflare cdn? They also have websockets support among plenty of other things

[dalisoft]

@JemiloII You can look at here for ways to serve file/directory. Or use Cloudflare CDN as suggested by @nickchomey

[JemiloII]

Can't use cloud flare as a cdn, my website generates images and other content. It would be too slow to upload to a cdn and then serve. Faster to just serve from the server.

I don't want to use ngnix to serve static files. I just want to use uWS. I don't want to mess with proxies, on a server instance just to serve content on port 80/443. For my experience with Cloudflare, it doesn't play nice with sockets on other ports if you're not a pro member. Even as a pro member, the sockets for my use cases when proxies perform better on those ports.

[nickchomey]

I think you're misunderstanding a cdn. If you proxy your dns through cloudflare, it will automatically cache all static assets when requested and serve those automatically to future visitors. Not only that, but it gets served from "the edge" - their 300+ datacenters that are much closer to your visitors than your server will be.

Html needs to be specifically selected for caching though - they have docs on it.

They also offer Cloudflare Pages for static sites. It might suit your needs.

[uNetworkingAB]

App.static(path) could definitely be a feature to look at some point but not right now. uWS doesn't exist where it doesn't provide exceptional value, and so if it would have app.static, it would have to be one of the best performing such features. Right now, that's not the case, since it would require kTLS and sendfile which would lock it to Linux only, which is not the plan. So it's more than just an opinion - I don't want to add features which aren't obviously motivated. Esp. not since most companies use proxies and proxies have static file serving built-in

[Mupli]

I thought that this project is used only by smaller teams or geek guys. Companies usually have teams and use nodejs because they don't care about tech they just want to have something "stable" without SPOF (sorry:0).

[uasan]

App.static(path) - anyone who needs such an interface can and should use a proxy.

The whole point is why we can't use a proxy and why the file sending interface should be different.

We check the user's access rights to this file, i.e. before sending the file, we make queries to the database and determine whether the user can receive this file or not, plus private caching headers and give 304 status if clients have the file in the local cache, plus the real path to the file is often much more complex and private than a string request.

Thus, it is much more useful to have a method response.sendFile(path, range optional) that we independently call inside our route handlers, this method is much smarter and more flexible.

The effectiveness of this method is important only in Linux (production) in Windows and macOS this method does not have to work very quickly and efficiently, because these operating systems are not for production but for development

Thanks.

[uNetworkingAB]

I agree, you can make App.static using parameter route and sendFile

[erf]

Just started looking at this library and made a minimal file handler that worked for my case. I pushed it to a repo here

import fs from 'node:fs/promises';
import mime from 'mime-types';

const sendFile = (filePath, res) => {
	res.onAborted(() => {
		res.aborted = true;
	});
	console.log(`send file -> ${filePath}`)
	fs.readFile(filePath).then(data => {
		if (!res.aborted) {
			res.cork(() => {
				res.writeStatus('200')
				res.writeHeader('Content-Type', mime.lookup(filePath))
				res.end(data)
			})
		}
	}).catch(err => {
		console.log(err);
		if (!res.aborted) {
			res.cork(() => {
				res.writeStatus('404')
				res.end()
			})
		}
	})
}

export { sendFile }

[erf]

yeah should probably use a stream like in the example here, but seem to work for my use case (just a smaller js files) for testing locally (do you know the size limit?), but i agree you should probably use nginx or similar in production.

[uasan]

if you have small files and they are immutable, then when the server starts, scan the folder with the files, save all the files in the local JS cache, and always give the respond from the JS cache, you don’t even need promises

[erf]

good idea - the "local JS cache" is just a map in memory you define i guess

[erf]

i added something like that here :)

[uasan]

for fileCache use Map and data.toString() no need to do this, save binary buffer and compress it with gzip if it is text files

[Mupli]

It would be nice if zero-copy support would be set. (Interesting read: https://lwn.net/Articles/726917/).

Note: And everyone suggest to setup proxy - nginx or cloudflare is the way. I don't fully agree with this. Setting additional proxy will add code/complexity to infrastructure and things to maintain. For smaller.. monolith/one-person projects it will be a problem to maintain.
My one project is dead because of proxy/nginx code. I would like to deploy it again but setting raw nginx from scratch is not easy as "npm start". (I fell pain when I think about all nginx configs.)

Note2: All frameworks that are based on uWS are doing some manual work there (better or worse). It would be nice to have native support.

Note3: Not sure how uWS is working internally but I treat it as a "hyperfast js server", adding super fast methods for files would just move uWS toward that goal.

Ps. sorry for the English.