Add a favicon to an express application

I’ve been working on an express app with a GET route that accepts an id as a parameter:

app.get('/:id', function(req, res) {
  //
});

The problem I ran into that took me awhile to figure out was that chrome was hitting that route to try and load the favicon.ico file. So basically my app was making one request to that route and chrome was making another request to that same route, but was throwing an error because favicon.ico isn’t a valid id in my app.

To have express return a favicon.ico file I installed serve-favicon.

Your app should look something like this:

var express = require('express');
var path = require('path');
var favicon = require('serve-favicon');
var app = express();
app.use(express.static('public'));
app.use(favicon(path.join(__dirname, '..', 'public', 'favicon.ico')));


app.get('/:id', function(req, res) {
  //
});

app.listen(3000);

Then place your favicon.ico file inside of your /public directory.