A Go web server that redirects URLs which don't correspond to a file to index.html or some other suitable page.

readme.md

ng-html5mode-serve

Hey. When you guys find the thing that already does this, preferably in Grunt, will you tell me? kthxbye.

What this does

So, you're serving an Angular app at http://ngexampleapp.com/, aka index.html. If we want simple static serving to work with routes (like /dashboard), we have to accept non-HTML5 mode URLs http://ngexampleapp.com/#/dashboard. And that's garbage.

We need a server that will respond to URLs like http://ngexampleapp.com/dashboard with index.html. Then our app could take over and take us to the right view. But we also need to serve some paths (like /styles/ and /scripts/) with their real files: not index.html.

This server takes a configuration that tells it what port to serve on and what routes to serve real files for. It will serve index.html for everything else.

Example Config

{
    "port": 4000,
    "file_paths": ["bower_components", "styles", "scripts", "views"]
 }

Example routes from config

Path	File served
/	index.html
/styles/main.css	styles/main.css
/scripts/controllers/app.js	scripts/controllers/app.js
/dashboard	index.html
/experimental-dev-path	index.html

See how nice that is?

It's written in Go, which is because I wanted something in 20 minutes and didn't know node yet. Hidden benefit: automatically sends correct Content-Type with the files via file extention or automatic content type detection.

main.go

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"log"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

type Config struct {
	Port      int      `json:"port"`
	FilePaths []string `json:"file_paths"`
}

var config = new(Config)

func main() {
	// Read config
	configFile, err := os.Open("ng-html5mode-serve.json")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln(err)
	}

	configDecoder := json.NewDecoder(configFile)
	err = configDecoder.Decode(config)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln(err)
	}

	// Handle file serve directories. Otherwise, serve index.html so Angular routes work.
	for _, filePath := range config.FilePaths {
		http.Handle(fmt.Sprintf("/%s/", filePath), http.FileServer(http.Dir("")))
	}
	http.HandleFunc("/", alwaysServeIndex)

	log.Println("Will serve on port", config.Port)

	err = http.ListenAndServe(fmt.Sprintf(":%d", config.Port), nil)
	log.Fatalln(err)
}

func alwaysServeIndex(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	file, err := os.Open("index.html")
	defer file.Close()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln(err)
	}

	_, err = io.Copy(w, file)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalln(err)
	}
}