NodeJS url request, absolute or relative?

Question

A very simple question but bothers me a lot.

what's the difference between the following two cases ?

index.html

 - script src="script/a.js"
 - script src="/script/a.js"  // starting with slash

and why my server can serve this request (starts with slash)

app.get('/script/a.js', function(req, res){ // with slash
    res.sendfile(__dirname + '/realfolder/script/a.js');
}); 

no matter the url src on client side is any case of those two cases I just mentioned ?

On the other hand, I always got 404 error if I serve the request in the following way (starts without slash)

app.get('script/a.js', function(req, res){ // without slash
    res.sendfile(__dirname + '/realfolder/script/a.js');
}); 

In my opinion, the path starts from '/' means the root folder of application and the other means relative path from __dirname. And I couldn't understand why my server can't handle app.get('script/a.js') this request which is without slash in the beginning ?

Anything wrong ?

Answer 1

When a path starts with a slash / it means that it is an absolute path. When it doesn't start with a slash, it is a relative path.

Lets see an example. Imagine that my hard disk has only the following folders:

main
    subfolder1
    subfolder2
        lastfolder

Now imagine we are in folder subfolder2 and we want to load a file that is inside lastfolder. We can load it with a relative path:

lastfolder/file.txt

But we can also use an absolute path:

/main/subfolder2/lastfolder/file.txt

Both paths are correct, but the relative one can fail if we move to a different folder (for example if we are in subfolder1), while the absolute path will always be correct (if we don't modify the folders of course).