📁 Static File Server

Flash provides a built-in static file server that allows you to serve static files such with autoresolving MIME types and caching.

WARNING

The static file server pre-registers literal routes for every file in the specified target directory. Creating/deleting files in the target directory will trigger the internal route registry to update accordingly. If you are planning to serve a compiled frontend application with a client-side router (think of react-router-dom), it is reccomended to use the Dynamic File Server instead,

Usage

To serve static files in Flash, you need to call the server.serveStatic() method with the endpoint path and an instance of StaticFileServerConfig. The configuration object is instanced like so :

public StaticFileServerConfiguration(
    boolean enableFileWatcher,
    boolean enableIndexRedirect,
    String destinationPath,
    SourceType sourceType
)

• enableFileWatcher : If set to true, the server will watch for changes in the served files and reload them automatically.
• enableIndexRedirect : If set to true, the server will redirect requests to directories to the index.html file.
• destinationPath : The path to the directory containing the files to be served.
• sourceType : The type of source to serve files from. It can be either FILESYSTEM or RESOURCESTREAM.

Registering the static file server is as simple as calling the server.serveStatic() method with the desired path and configuration object:

public class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        FlashServer server = new FlashServer(8080);

        server.serveStatic("/static", new StaticFileServerConfiguration(
            true,
            true,
            "path/to/static/files",
            SourceType.FILESYSTEM
        ));
    }
}

Now you can access the files in the specified directory by navigating to http://localhost:8080/static/<file-name>.

Similarly, you can serve files from the jar's resources folder by setting the sourceType to RESOURCESTREAM:

public class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        FlashServer server = new FlashServer(8080);

        server.serveStatic("/static", new StaticFileServerConfiguration(
            true,
            true,
            "path/to/static/files",
            SourceType.RESOURCESTREAM
        ));
    }
}