Using the Directory-serving Middleware in Express

If you peruse the docs for ExpressJS (as I do every Sunday), you might notice this little gem called Directory:

Directory serving middleware that serves the given path. This middleware may be paired with static() to serve files, providing a full-featured file browser.

I was curious how this worked since both Apache and IIS have this built in as well. I whipped up a quick Express application (remember you can create one with the Express command line program) and tried the feature out.

First, note that the docs use this as an example:

app.use(express.directory('public'));

When I first tried this with an application it didn't work. I had forgotten to include a path with the app.use statement. This made it default to /, but I was always using that path with the out-of-the-box code. I quickly changed it to this:

app.use('/dropbox',express.directory('/Users/ray/Dropbox'));

This let me map /dropbox in the browser path to my local Dropbox install. Here's how this is rendered by Express^*:

As you can see it is nice, if somewhat minimal. You can click to browse into subfolders:

The search field has a nice highlight effect, but is case-sensitive which seems like an odd choice:

There are a few options you can use with the Directory middleware. One is icon support, but in my testing this was very poorly implemented. As far as I could tell it only supported PDFs. I appreciate the Adobe-love there, but it seems odd that other file types weren't recognized.

Here is an example of how you would enable it:

app.use('/dropbox',express.directory('/Users/ray/Dropbox',{icons:true}));

And the result:

Yet another option is the ability to filter the results. The docs don't tell you how to use this. I supplied a function to my options object and simply did a console.log(arguments) to see what was passed.

From what I could see there were three arguments. The first is the name of the item. The second is the index (i.e., the number representing which item in the list this is--zero based). The third item is the entire list. Again, oddly, you aren't told if the item is a file or a directory. Since you know what directory you're working with you could simply check this yourself but it would certainly be helpful if the middleware provided this. I wrote this function to show directories and PDF files. Note that my "directory logic" is a hack. I simply see if the name has a period in it. This is not a real test!

app.use('/dropbox',express.directory('/Users/ray/Dropbox',
  {icons:true,
		filter:function(file,pos,list) {
			console.log(arguments);
			return (file.indexOf('.') === -1 || file.indexOf('pdf') >= 1);
		}
	}
));

Finally, don't forget that if you want to actually serve the files you have to combine with it a static call as well:

app.use('/dropbox',express.static('/Users/ray/Dropbox'));

* As an FYI, the Directory middleware is actually provided by Connect, which Express builds upon. This tends to confuse me at times.