How to Generate Static HTML Files with Express/EJS, and Serve Them through Nginx

Описание: Discover how to generate static HTML files using Express and EJS, and serve them via Nginx. Optimize your web application and streamline your workflows!
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/70777906/ asked by the user 'Cedric Hadjian' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/8529972/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/70778021/ provided by the user 'jfriend00' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/816620/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Generate Static HTML Files with Express and EJS to Serve via Nginx

In the world of web development, optimizing how you serve your content can make a big difference in performance and ease of management. One common scenario developers face is the generation and serving of HTML files using Express, EJS, and Nginx. This guide will guide you through a practical approach to achieve this by generating static HTML files that can be served by Nginx instead of relying on Node.js to handle dynamic rendering requests.

The Problem: Serving EJS-rendered Pages via Nginx

Imagine you have a JSON file containing data that you'd like to present on an HTML page. Normally, you might use Express to render these pages dynamically. However, if you want to pre-generate the HTML files and serve them directly via Nginx for better performance and scalability, how would you go about it? Let’s discuss a solution.

Solution Overview

The solution involves a few key steps:

Using EJS to generate HTML files.

Saving the generated HTML to an Nginx directory.

Configuring Nginx to serve those static files.

Step 1: Set Up Your Environment

To get started, ensure you have the following components installed:

Node.js: The JavaScript runtime to run your server-side scripts

Express: A minimalistic web application framework for Node.js

EJS: A templating engine that lets you generate HTML markup using JavaScript

Nginx: A high-performance web server

Step 2: Prepare Your JSON Data

Suppose you have a JSON file, data.json, structured like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 3: Create Your EJS Template

Next, create an EJS template file named index.ejs as follows:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 4: Write a Script to Generate HTML Files

Use a Node.js script to read your JSON data, render it with EJS, and save the generated HTML files. Here’s a sample code snippet to perform this task:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 5: Configure Nginx to Serve Your Static Files

Lastly, configure your Nginx server to point to the directory where you saved your generated HTML files. A simple Nginx configuration might look like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Conclusion

By pre-generating your HTML using EJS and storing the files in a directory that Nginx serves, you can effectively improve the performance of your web application. This method is particularly useful for static content that doesn’t change frequently, allowing you to leverage Nginx’s speed and efficiency in serving your HTML files.

This approach eliminates the need for Express to serve dynamic content and can improve load times and reduce server load, especially under high traffic conditions.

By following these steps, you can easily generate static HTML files using EJS and serve them via Nginx. It's a streamlined and efficient process that can greatly enhance your web application's performance.