Serve-favicon is designed as a middleware for Node.js, which specifically caters to serving a website's favorite icon - popularly known as a favicon. These favicons often appear in the address bar or tabs of your browser to help identify a site. Using serve-favicon not only aids in successful favicon delivery to end-users, but also significantly optimizes performance by caching the icon in memory, mitigating the need for repeated disk access. Moreover, serve-favicon ensures the delivery of the icon with an ETag based on its content, rather than file system properties, and presents it with the most compatible Content-Type
.
To implement serve-favicon in your application, you must first integrate it into your project by installing it via the npm registry using the npm install command:
$ npm install serve-favicon
Here are three ways you can use serve-favicon:
Using Express:
var express = require('express')
var favicon = require('serve-favicon')
var path = require('path')
var app = express()
app.use(favicon(path.join(__dirname, 'public', 'favicon.ico')))
// Add your routes here.
app.listen(3000)
Using Connect:
var connect = require('connect')
var favicon = require('serve-favicon')
var path = require('path')
var app = connect()
app.use(favicon(path.join(__dirname, 'public', 'favicon.ico')))
// Add your middleware here.
app.listen(3000)
Using Vanilla HTTP Server:
var http = require('http')
var favicon = require('serve-favicon')
var finalhandler = require('finalhandler')
var path = require('path')
var _favicon = favicon(path.join(__dirname, 'public', 'favicon.ico'))
var server = http.createServer(function onRequest (req, res) {
var done = finalhandler(req, res)
_favicon(req, res, function onNext (err) {
if (err) return done(err)
// continue processing the request.
res.statusCode = 404
res.end('oops')
})
})
server.listen(3000)
The favicon(path, options)
function is used to establish the middleware. The path
parameter describes the location of your favicon file, while options
is an optional object parameter allowing you to set properties such as maxAge
for cache-control.
For in-depth information and further usage examples, please refer to the serve-favicon documentation which is hosted on GitHub, at the given repository.