express.static does not deliver

Question

I searched through all topics, but could not find a similar issue.

I have a server.js in the folder /build

// /build/server.js

import express from 'express';

const app = express();

app.use('/static', express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'build', 'static'), { maxAge: '30d' }));

and a css file in /build/static/css/my.css . I start nodemon with build/server.js from the root folder /

I assume that I should get my file via localhost:8080/static/css/my.css But it returns a 404 and "Cannot GET /static/css/my.css"

What could be the issue? I tried a lot of different paths, but never got a successful response.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I finally decided to go with __dirname to prevent errors caused by relative paths to the directory the server is started from.

The main problem was that __dirname always returned / . I added the following lines to my webpack config:

target: 'node', // was already there
node: { // has been added
  __filename: false,
  __dirname: false
},

You can find a closer description of this behaviour of __dirname in webpack here: https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/2010#issuecomment-181256611