Express is a popular web application server in JavaScript.
Let’s create a really quick and simple expression server which will be a good starting point for further posts which use this library.
I’ll assume you’ve created a folder, run yarn init and tsc –init, next up run
- yarn add express
- yarn add -D @types/express
- Add a new file, mine’s named server.ts
- Add the usual scripts
1234
"scripts"
: {
"build"
:
"tsc"
,
"start"
:
"node server.js"
}
The code to run up a really simple server is as follows
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | import express from "express" ; const server = express(); server.get( "/" , (request, response) => { response.send( "<h1>Hello World</h1>" ); }); const port = 4000 ; server.listen(port, () => console.log(`Server on port ${port}`) ); |
Using our scripts, run yarn build followed by yarn start. The server should start on port 4000, so now navigate to http://localhost:4000 using your preferred browser and that’s it.
We’ve created a server instance on port 4000, we’re routed any root (i.e. /) calls to the response, which in this case returns a simple HTML string.