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Serving Images

You may be wondering how the fileserver knew to serve the index.html file to the root of the server. It's such a common convention on the web to use a file called index.html to serve the webpage for a given path, that many file-serving libraries do it automatically.

When using a standard fileserver, the path to a file on disk is the same as its URL path. An exception is that index.html is often served from / instead of /index.html.

Try It Out

Run your chirpy server again, and open http://localhost:8080/index.html in a new browser tab. You'll notice that you're served the same content as if you went to http://localhost:8080/.

This works for all directories, not just the root!

For example:

/index.html will be served from /
/pages/index.html will be served from /pages
/pages/about/index.html will be served from /pages/about

Alternatively, try opening a URL that doesn't exist, like http://localhost:8080/doesntexist.html. You'll see that the fileserver returns a 404 error.

Assignment

Let's serve another type of file from our server: an image. Chirpy has a slick logo, and we need to serve it so that our users can load it in their browsers and mobile apps.

Download the Chirpy logo from below and add it to your project directory.

Configure its filepath so that it's accessible from this URL:

http://localhost:8080/assets/logo.png

Run and submit the CLI tests.