Creating an HTTP Web Server using Node.js

Creating HTTP Server

Hello Everyone 👋

Thanks for stopping by again! Today, we're going to dive into how you can create a basic HTTP Web Server using Node.js.

Node.js is a runtime environment that lets you run JavaScript code outside the browser, and it's amazing for building fast and scalable network applications.

🛠 Step-by-step: Creating the HTTP Server

Let's start by creating a file called server.js and write our first HTTP server.

1. Importing the http module

Node.js comes with a built-in module called http, which we can use to create web servers.

const http = require('http')

2. Creating the server

We use http.createServer() method which takes a callback function. This callback gets two parameters: req (the request object) and res (the response object).

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.statusCode = 200
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain')
  res.end('Hello, World! This is my first Node.js server.')
})

Server Running

3. Defining the port

We’ll specify the port number where our server will listen:

const PORT = 3000

4. Starting the server

Finally, we’ll make the server listen to the specified port and log a message when it starts:

server.listen(PORT, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://localhost:${PORT}/`)
})

🧪 Final Code

const http = require('http')

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.statusCode = 200
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain')
  res.end('Hello, World! This is my first Node.js server.')
})

const PORT = 3000

server.listen(PORT, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://localhost:${PORT}/`)
})

💻 Run it Yourself!

  1. Save this code in a file named server.js
  2. Open your terminal and run:
node server.js
  1. Open your browser and go to http://localhost:3000. You should see: Hello, World! This is my first Node.js server.

You can also experiment and try returning HTML, JSON or even build a small API.

Stay tuned for more cool Node.js stuff coming soon ⚡️