[node.js] display html page with node.js

This is my first time with node.js. I get it to display the index.html, but it doesn't display the images on the site or anything else, it ONLY shows the basic html stuff. Here's how I set it up. There's no apache, php or anything else on the server, just ubuntu, proftp and node(and curl and the other dependencies). I made the main directory for the node files /var/nodeFiles and the directory for the html/site files is /var/nodeFiles/www so for my node server file I did it like this:

var http = require('http'),
    fs = require('fs');
fs.readFile('/var/nodeFiles/www/index.html', function (err, html) {
    if (err) {
        throw err; 
    }       
    http.createServer(function(request, response) {  
        response.writeHeader(200, {"Content-Type": "text/html"});  
        response.write(html);  
        response.end();  
    }).listen(80);
});

this works, but it ONLY shows the index.html file and NOTHING attached to it, so no images, no effects or anything that the html file should display. The files and directories are all correct, I've double checked and the permissions of the folders are correct. So what else do I have to do to get node to display the rest of the site? I hope I've explained my self correctly, I was told this is the place to ask development questions. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

This did the trick for me:

var express = require('express'),
app = express(); 
app.use('/', express.static(__dirname + '/'));
app.listen(8080);

Check this basic code to setup html server. its work for me.

var http = require('http'),
    fs = require('fs');


fs.readFile('./index.html', function (err, html) {
    if (err) {
        throw err; 
    }       
    http.createServer(function(request, response) {  
        response.writeHeader(200, {"Content-Type": "text/html"});  
        response.write(html);  
        response.end();  
    }).listen(8000);
});

If your goal is to simply display some static files you can use the Connect package. I have had some success (I'm still pretty new to NodeJS myself), using it and the twitter bootstrap API in combination.

at the command line

:\> cd <path you wish your server to reside>
:\> npm install connect

Then in a file (I named) Server.js

var connect = require('connect'),
   http = require('http');
connect()
   .use(connect.static('<pathyouwishtoserve>'))
   .use(connect.directory('<pathyouwishtoserve>'))
   .listen(8080);

Finally

:\>node Server.js

Caveats:

If you don't want to display the directory contents, exclude the .use(connect.directory line.

So I created a folder called "server" placed index.html in the folder and the bootstrap API in the same folder. Then when you access the computers IP:8080 it's automagically going to use the index.html file.

If you want to use port 80 (so just going to http://, and you don't have to type in :8080 or some other port). you'll need to start node with sudo, I'm not sure of the security implications but if you're just using it for an internal network, I don't personally think it's a big deal. Exposing to the outside world is another story.

Update 1/28/2014:

I haven't had to do the following on my latest versions of things, so try it out like above first, if it doesn't work (and you read the errors complaining it can't find nodejs), go ahead and possibly try the below.

End Update

Additionally when running in ubuntu I ran into a problem using nodejs as the name (with NPM), if you're having this problem, I recommend using an alias or something to "rename" nodejs to node.

Commands I used (for better or worse):

Create a new file called node

:\>gedit /usr/local/bin/node
#!/bin/bash
exec /nodejs "$@"

sudo chmod -x /usr/local/bin/node

That ought to make

node Server.js 

work just fine