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Local NodeJS development environment with Nginx

1^st of September 2010

I'm brand spanking new to the node.js web application development. The framework I'm currently using is express which seems OK. So I've got an app that consists of 1 static HTML file, a lot of Javscript/CSS/image resources and some express GET and POST views that return small snippets of HTML. All data will be loaded with AJAX to avoid having to use any HTML templating on first load. What's cool about this is that it's soo fast! Everything except the JSON data can be loaded from an Nginx server.

At the moment I've got a light static HTML page that loads about 240Kb of Javascript and CSS (jQuery UI is big) and a couple of bytes of JSON data pulled from Node. As a little anal perfectionism I put an Nginx server in front so that Node doesn't have to serve any of the static files. To get that you have to have a Nginx site enabled that looks like this:

 server {
    root /home/peterbe/task-calendar/static;
    location / {
      if (-f $request_filename) {
          add_header X-Static hit;
          access_log   off;
      }
      if (!-f $request_filename) {
          proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000; # where Node is running
          add_header X-Static miss;
      }
    }
 }

I think much of the fun of working with this app is that it's a delight to see it load in the browser without any sluggishness or delay. Lovely!

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