How do express static directories work with a 404 route? - node.js

Question

I have some code that looks like the following:
app.configure(function() {
app.set("views", __dirname + "/views");
app.set("view engine", "ejs");
app.use(express.bodyParser());
app.use(express.methodOverride());
app.use(express.logger());
app.use(app.router);
app.use(express.static(__dirname + "/public"));
});
//Routes
app.get("/", function(req, res) {
res.render("index.ejs", {locals: {
title: "Welcome"
}});
});
//Handle 404
app.get("/*", function(req, res, next) {
next("Could not find page");
});
The problem I have is that I can't access anything in the /public static directory: everything gets caught by the 404 route. Am I missing something about how this is supposed to work?

Answer 1

You're doing
app.use(app.router);
app.use(express.static(__dirname + "/public"));
What you want to do is
app.use(express.static(__dirname + "/public"));
app.use(app.router);
Since you have a catch all route in app.router it must be lower then anything else. otherwise the catch all route will indeed catch everything and the rest of the middleware is ignored.
As an aside catch all routes like that are bad.

Answer 2

A better solution would be to place the following code after all calls to app.use:
app.use(function(req, res) {
res.send(404, 'Page not found');
});
Or a similar function.
Do this instead of using app.get("/*", ...

Answer 3

I'm doing it a slightly different way. If you look at the middleware code for the static file server it allows for a callback function that gets called with errors. Only catch is you need the response object to send something useful back to the server. So I do the following:
var errMsgs = { "404": "Dang that file is missing" };
app.use(function(req, res, next){
express.static.send(req, res, next, {
root: __dirname + "/public",
path: req.url,
getOnly: true,
callback: function(err) {
console.log(err);
var code = err.status || 404,
msg = errMsgs["" + code] || "All is not right in the world";
res.render("error", { code: code, msg: msg, layout: false});
}
});
});
Basically what happens is if there is an error it renders my pretty error page and logs something so that I can debug somewhere.