EJS Engine Setup

Listen close. A robust server doesn’t just push raw JSON; sometimes it needs to paint the whole picture. Installing EJS isn’t just adding a dependency—it’s giving your application the ability to construct complete HTML documents on the fly, tailored to every request that hits your line.

Installation

The EJS package must be installed as a dependency. Unlike middleware that is explicitly imported, Express handles the loading of view engines internally when properly configured.

npm install ejs

Application Configuration

To enable server-side rendering, specific settings on the Express application instance must be defined. The views setting specifies the directory lookup path for template files, while the view engine setting defines the extension and internal module to utilize for rendering.

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
const path = require("path");

// Configuration: Define the absolute path for template files
app.set("views", path.join(__dirname, "views"));

// Configuration: Set EJS as the default templating engine
app.set("view engine", "ejs");

The Path Module Necessity

Do not rely on relative paths like ./views. Relative paths are resolved relative to the process’s current working directory (CWD), which may vary depending on how the script is executed.

Using path.join(__dirname, "views") constructs an absolute path dynamically based on the location of the executing file (__dirname). This ensures the application correctly locates the views directory regardless of the operating system or the command used to start the process.

⏭ Rendering Static Views

Configuration is complete. Next, we examine how to serve these templates to the client.