Simple web server in Node.js. This fork added mime types for common file types.

static_server.js

var http = require("http"),
    url = require("url"),
    path = require("path"),
    fs = require("fs")
    port = process.argv[2] || 8888,
    mimeTypes = {
      "html": "text/html",
      "jpeg": "image/jpeg",
      "jpg": "image/jpeg",
      "png": "image/png",
      "svg": "image/svg+xml",
      "json": "application/json",
      "js": "text/javascript",
      "css": "text/css"
    };
 
http.createServer(function(request, response) {
 
  var uri = url.parse(request.url).pathname, 
      filename = path.join(process.cwd(), uri);
  
  fs.exists(filename, function(exists) {
    if(!exists) {
      response.writeHead(404, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" });
      response.write("404 Not Found\n");
      response.end();
      return;
    }
 
    if (fs.statSync(filename).isDirectory()) 
      filename += '/index.html';
 
    fs.readFile(filename, "binary", function(err, file) {
      if(err) {        
        response.writeHead(500, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
        response.write(err + "\n");
        response.end();
        return;
      }
      
      var mimeType = mimeTypes[filename.split('.').pop()];
      
      if (!mimeType) {
        mimeType = 'text/plain';
      }
      
      response.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": mimeType });
      response.write(file, "binary");
      response.end();
    });
  });
}).listen(parseInt(port, 10));

console.log("Static file server running at\n  => http://localhost:" + port + "/\nCTRL + C to shutdown");

@oxk4r01 I think since we are dealing with files of different encoding, text, image, etc, it makes sense to read the file in the raw binary format. Also, we are not interested in actually parsing and understand the file content - just passing it to the response stream.

The code can probably be optimised with using file streams instead.