How do I use HTML as the view engine in Express

Question

I tried this simple change from the seed and created the corresponding .html files (e.g. index.html).

//app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.set('view engine', 'html');

and this file remained the same:

exports.index = function(req, res){
  res.render('index');
};

but while running I get

500 Error: Cannot find module 'html'

Is my only option to use 'ejs'? My intent was to use plain HTML in conjuction with AngularJS.

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

To make the render engine accept html instead of jade you can follow the following steps;

1. Install consolidate and swig to your directory.

    npm install consolidate
    npm install swig

2. add following lines to your app.js file

   var cons = require('consolidate');
   
   // view engine setup
   app.engine('html', cons.swig)
   app.set('views', path.join(__dirname, 'views'));
   app.set('view engine', 'html');

3. add your view templates as .html inside “views” folder. Restart you node server and start the app in the browser.

Though this will render html without any issue, I would recommend you to use JADE by learning it. Jade is an amazing template engine and learning this will help you achieve better design & scalability.

Hope it helps!!

Thank you!!