Node, Angular, Express and the view engine

Question

I recently started using Angular, Node and Express. I have made some working browser-based applications in Angular and am attempting to port them to server applications in Node and Express. (In particular, one will pull data from Twitter and another from Wikidot.)

Since I am using Angular for data injection and templating, I do not want to use another view engine such as EJS or Jade. I want to use the HTML/Angular code that I have already written with as little modification as possible. I'm very confused as to why Express requires me to have a view engine.

What is the simplest way to get this code working as a Node/Express application?

Answer 1

Since you're using AngularJS, I don't think you care a lot about Express's view engine, that's e.g. better if you're using Express to render HTML. Maybe you'll just use that to load your initial HTML (with links to all the .js, .css etc) into the browser (server-side template rendering), the rest of the work is done with AngularJS talking to your Express's HTTP service

Simple way is for you to return JSON from Express, try this function http://expressjs.com/api#res.json

Use AngularJS to communicate with Express, AngularJS renders the interesting things on the browser (client-side template rendering, and more)

Answer 2

The answer I was looking for is this line of code.

app.engine('html', require('ejs').renderFile);