serve-favicon

Node.js middleware for serving a favicon

this scoped version forked from expressjs/serve-favicon to:

• rewrite as an ECMAScript Module
• remove dependencies

A favicon is a visual cue that client software, like browsers, use to identify a site. For an example and more information, please visit the Wikipedia article on favicons.

Why use this module?

• User agents request favicon.ico frequently and indiscriminately, so you may wish to exclude these requests from your logs by using this middleware before your logger middleware.
• This module caches the icon in memory to improve performance by skipping disk access.
• This module provides an ETag based on the contents of the icon, rather than file system properties.
• This module will serve with the most compatible Content-Type.

Note This module is exclusively for serving the “default, implicit favicon”, which is GET /favicon.ico. For additional vendor-specific icons that require HTML markup, additional middleware is required to serve the relevant files, for example serve-static.

Install

This is an ECMAScript Module available through the npm registry. Installation is done using the npm install command:

1$ npm install @robireton/serve-favicon

API

favicon(path, options)

Create new middleware to serve a favicon from the given path to a favicon file. path may also be a Buffer of the icon to serve.

Options

Serve favicon accepts these properties in the options object.

maxAge

The cache-control max-age directive in ms, defaulting to 1 year.

Example

Typically this middleware will come very early in your stack (maybe even first) to avoid processing any other middleware if we already know the request is for /favicon.ico.

express

1import { resolve } from 'node:path'
2import express from 'express'
3import favicon from '@robireton/serve-favicon'
4
5const app = express()
6app.use(favicon(resolve('static/favicon.ico')))
7
8// Add your routes here, etc.
9
10app.listen(3000)

License

MIT