How do I use the middleware on a path other than '/' ?

[wolfgang42]

❔ Question

How can I tell the Bundler middleware to serve out of a subdirectory path?

I'd like to serve a Parcel-bundled app as a subdirectory of an Express app. For production I plan on just pointing Nginx to the dist/ folder, but for development I'd like to integrate the Parcel middleware into the main server, with hot-reloading etc. I've therefore followed the API docs and attached a new Bundler().middleware() to the existing Express app, and told the Bundler what its public URL is:

app.use('/app/', new Bundler(__dirname+'/../browserclient/src/index.html', {
	publicUrl: '/app/',
}).middleware())

Unfortunately, this just serves the index page for everything under /app/, including the JS and CSS bundles. This appears to be because of

parcel/packages/core/parcel-bundler/src/Server.js

Lines 57 to 63 in 0b98eed

	} else if (
	!pathname.startsWith(bundler.options.publicURL) ||
	path.extname(pathname) === ''
	) {
	// If the URL doesn't start with the public path, or the URL doesn't
	// have a file extension, send the main HTML bundle.
	return sendIndex();

which checks if the middleware is serving a known path under options.publicURL. Unfortunately since I'm using app.use(path, ...) the pathname variable is relative to /app/ (that is, it goes /index.deadbeef.js, not /app/index.deadbeef.js) and so never matches, and the bundled code can never be served. If I just tell it to app.use(new Bundler()) then it works, but Parcel also takes over the rest of the server and starts handing out its index instead of 404 pages.

🌍 Your Environment

Software	Version(s)
Parcel	1.12.3
Node	8.9.4
Express	4.13.4

[Kogia-sima]

I think you can change req.url by assigning req.originalUrl.

const parcel_middleware = new Bundler(__dirname+'/../browserclient/src/index.html', {
	publicUrl: '/app/',
}).middleware();

app.use('/api', function(req, res, next) {
    req.url = req.originalUrl;
    parcel_middleware(req, res, next);
});

[Kogia-sima]

Minimal example: https://github.com/Kogia-sima/express-parcel-example

[Kogia-sima]

But this is confusing. It is better if Parcel use req.originalUrl if it is defined, instead of using req.url, with which Parcel cannot detect the middleware is used for root (/) path or another url.

[zocky]

The problem with the example solution at github is that it doesn't work at /path, only at /path/.

And anyway, isn't this what .publicUrl is for, and this is already supposed to be working out of the box? I.e. isni't this a bug, or am I misunderstanding what .publicUrl is for?

[wolfgang42]

@mischnic Any chance this can get backported also? As a workaround I have a bunch of extra terminal windows running parcel instances, but it'd be a lot easier if this could all be part of my main server program.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.