In yaydoc WebUI, documentation is generated using sphnix and can be downloaded as a zip file. If the user wants to see a preview of the documentation they have to unzip the zipped file and have to check the generated website for each and every build. So, we decided to implement preview feature to show the preview of generated documentation so that user will have an idea of how the website would look. Since WebUI is made with Express, we implemented the preview feature using Express’s static function. Mostly static function is used for serving static assets but we used to serve our generated site because all the generated sites are static. All the generated documentation will have an unique id and all the unique ids are generated as per uuidv4 spec. The generated document will be saved and moved to the unique folder.

mv $BUILD_DIR/_build/html $ROOT_DIR/../${UNIQUEID}_preview && cd $_/../

var express = require("express")
var path = require("path")
var favicon = require("serve-favicon");
var logger = require("morgan");
var cookieParser = require("cookie-parser");
var bodyParser = require("body-parser");
var uuidV4 = require("uuid/v4");

var app = express();
app.use(logger("dev"));
app.use(bodyParser.json()); 
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false }));
app.use(cookieParser()); app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, "public")));
app.use("/preview", express.static(path.join(__dirname, "temp")))

app.listen(3000)

The above snippet is the just a basic Express server. In which, we have a route /preview and with the express static handler. Pass the path of your generated website as  argument, Then your sites are served over /preview route.

Resources:

• https://expressjs.com/en/starter/static-files.html