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Creating a Simple Server
10:56In this video, we'll take a look at the Node.js website and see how we can create our own server.
The first step in our planning was to
create a web server.
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That is, something that listens to
requests from clients like a web browser.
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Let's go to the node.js website and
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see what it has to say about creating web
servers.
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If you go to nodejs.org you'll see we've
got the home,
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downloads, docs, community, about, jobs,
and blog.
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But, also, on this homepage we can install
on our local machine.
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But they give us some examples of node.js
code.
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So here's an example of a web server,
which is what we wanna build.
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So it goes var, http, require http.
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Cool.
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Then it creates server.
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With a callback, with a req and a res,
which means request and response.
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And it writes 200, which is the status
code saying everything's okay.
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And it prints out text.
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Hello world.
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So this is end, this is the, the response
is end.
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And it listens on port 1337 or leet.
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[LAUGH] And listens on the IP address
127.0.0.1.
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Which is your local machine if you're on a
local machine.
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And it prints out a log.
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So, let's just copy and paste this into
our application.
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So underneath where we said to create a
web server let's paste this.
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And let's update the code so it doesn't
say res and req.
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So let's do request and response so
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it's absolutely clear what we're
programming here.
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Cuz it's not that obvious when it's in
that short hand.
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Now in order for this to work in
workspaces,
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if you look up here on the right hand side
we've got different port numbers.
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And those are just basically what the
server listens on to the outside world.
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So instead of having 1337, we can pick any
one of these numbers here,
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so we can pick 3000 for example.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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And because workspaces isn't our local
machine,
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it's a machine on the Internet with its
own IP address.
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We can just, actually, remove this
parameter here, and
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it will just listen, naturally, to the,
the world out there.
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And we can do, instead of this,
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we'll just write workspace url, just as a
placehold.
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It's, it doesn't do anything, it's just
for our benefit when we run the survey it
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shows that we've started running it, it's
just a console.log, it's nothing magic.
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So, if we do show console and
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then node app.js,
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we can see the server's running at the
workspace-url,
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and when we go to port 3000, it goes hello
world.
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So this is the URL here.
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Normally when you're on your local machine
you'd do something like localhost:3000,
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but because we're in workspaces theres a
special
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url that gets generated, and it says port
3000 at the beginning.
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It's just a convention that treehouse
uses,
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it's not anything that you'd do on your
local machine.
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So as we can see Hello World is printing
out, but
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what happens if we go to say /chalkers or
something like that.
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It still says Hello World.
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So every single route we go to it just
prints out that response, Hello World.
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So we'll need to figure out how to handle
different URLs in the future.
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Let's try out writing more than just one
line to the response.
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We can do response.write.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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And we can say this is before the end,
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and slash enters the return character and
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afterwards let's do response don't write.
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This is after the end.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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So what, what I'm saying by end is in this
method here, this response to end call.
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And let's run this in the console.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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App.js, and we've got a problem.
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When we scroll up it says that the listen
address is in use,
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so port 3000 is already being listened to
so.
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What happened is when we closed the
console to get more screen space,
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Node was still running.
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It's still running right now in the
workspace.
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But the problem is is that when we started
up a new console,
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we're trying to bind to that same port.
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We're trying to listen on that same port
3000.
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So we need to kill the process of node.
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Now, if you're not familiar with killing
processes, it's fairly simple.
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What you need to do is figure out what you
need to kill.
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So [LAUGH] you do PS which is for
processes and then just type aux.
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And as you can see here we've got a node
app running, and
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this is the identification number for that
particular app instance running.
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So we can do kill minus nine, four, nine,
six.
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And then it should have killed it.
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So, now we can do node, app.js and it
should run perfectly.
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So, be mindful that you can kill the
server by just putting Ctrl+C twice.
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And it will, you can boot it up again like
that, or
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you'd have to go through the process where
you do ps minus aux and
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then find the process ID and then kill
that process.
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So let's go to here and it says this is
before the end.
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Hello world.
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And we don't see this is after the end.
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That's because, when we call the end, we
can't write to the response anymore.
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The end says it's done.
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The response is over from the server,
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so the browser isn't gonna be listening to
anything coming from the server anymore.
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So, let's try something else out.
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We can do a set interval.
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And setInterval is a way for doing
something every so many milliseconds.
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So we can do something like print
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the dates of the response, of the day time
every one second.
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So in milliseconds that's 1,000.
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Milliseconds per second, and we can write.
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I'm just going to terminate this node
instance by doing Cmd+C, click on x.
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Sorry, not Cmd+C, Ctrl+C.
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And then let's write new date.
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And we can add that to the return counter
so
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we'll see the date get printed out on
every single line.
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Let's get rid of this after response.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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And do response to end and see what
happens.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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Node.
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So let's type node app.js.
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Click on preview.
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And it just says hello world.
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What, what happened there?
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Well, set interval actually executes
after that first second so
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this callback got called after this line
of code got executed,
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so the callback gets executed one second
after this gets run.
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So, it doesn't go to the response.
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So lets get rid of the end of the
response, hello world, and
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just see what's happens when we just run
the set interval.
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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So, it took about 20 seconds or so for
this to show up on the page
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because Chrome expects that a web page is
being delivered.
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Like the header, the body,
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the footer, all those types of things are
going to be delivered.
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But because we're not actually ending the
response,
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it waited 20 seconds before attempting to
render it.
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Because it felt like, oh maybe we'll get
all this information together and
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we can render the HTML, or what have you.
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So, Chrome waited for a while, expecting
that the file
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that it's downloading is HTML or text or
what have you.
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It expected that it have an end, but
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because we didn't specify an end, it gave
up after 20 seconds or so,
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and then it starts printing out the time
every one second.
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So this is a kind of a powerful thing that
node can do is it,
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it can literally create a connection and
keep it open and keep sending data down.
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And for some applications that's really
good and which,
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which we won't cover in this course, but
we'll cover in a future time.
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So let's just kill that instance by doing
Cmd Ctrl+C.
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And in the next video we'll figure out how
to handle multiple roots,
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because we're doing the same thing in all
the different roots right now.
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Experiencing JavaScript's asynchronous
nature in the context of creating
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a web server response provided us with a
very important learning opportunity
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that once the end method is called on the
response,
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you can't add additional data to the
response.
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