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JavaScript

Posted by Cezar Mart
Cezar Mart
8,401 Points

NodeJS sample code runs differently than in course presentation

Course 'Build a Simple Dynamic Site with Node.js' with Andrew Chalkers. I spent hours trying to figure out the problem and simply I have no clue what is happening. Here is trivial code:

app.js

var router = require("./router.js");

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function(request, response){

    router.home(request, response);

    router.user(request, response);

}).listen(3000);

router.js

function homeRoute(request, response) {
    response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type' : 'text/plain'});
    if(request.url === '/') {
        response.write('Header\n');
        response.write('Search\n');
        response.end('Footer\n');
    }
}

function userRoute(request, response) {

    response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type' : 'text/plain'});

    var username = request.url.replace('/', '');

    if ( username.length > 0 ) {

        response.write('Header\n');

        console.log("after header for [" + username + "]");

        response.write('got it for [' + username + ']' + '\n');

        response.end('Footer\n');

    }
}

module.exports.home = homeRoute;
module.exports.user = userRoute;

and then when I run "node app.js" and type url: http://localhost:3000/chalkers I am getting this console log:

after header for [chalkers]

after header for [favicon.ico]

it is as if someone right after I send my url kept issuing some url with /favicon.ico. The problem is that when I try call user profile on user favicon.ico it crashes the server.

Anybody knows where this 'favicon.ico' comes from?

Thanks Cezar

rydavim
rydavim
18,814 Points

I haven't done that particular course yet, but if you're able to post a workspace snapshot I can take a look and see if we can't figure out what's causing the snag.

1 Answer

Cena Mayo
Cena Mayo
55,236 Points
Cena Mayo
Cena Mayo
55,236 Points

Hi Cezar,

The 'favicon.ico' is an icon (image) file used by many sites to display a small image by the site url in the address bar of your browser. It's not a user.

From what I can gather, node automatically requests this file on get requests. (There's actually a npm package called serve-favicon, which allows you to get around this.)

That said, I just tested your files on my localhost, using node 4.2.1, and it's running correctly without making requests to favicon.ico. However, I haven't been able to confirm if this is because node 4.x has corrected the issue; I assume that Treehouse's version is older than 4.