Transferring data as small chunks is the best way to transfer files from the server to clients. Since the whole data is not loaded into the memory at once, so it saves a lot of memory and is very easy to transfer through the internet.

For example, Let's say we have an endpoint for a video and want to stream the video data.

We can use Streams in Node.js for solving this.

For simplicity let's use Express.js to build our endpoint.

// endpoint for /video
app.get("/video", (req, res) => {
  // code goes here
});

Now consider that we have the required video file in a directory called videos and the name of the video file is hello.mp4. To stream the video you can create a read stream of the video file like this,

// get the filesystem module
const fs = require("fs");

// endpoint for /video
app.get("/video", (req, res) => {
  // create a read stream for the video hello.mp4
  const rs = fs.createReadStream("./videos/hello.mp4");
});

After creating the read stream we need to set some headers to let know the client some information about the video that we are streaming.

The basic information includes the size of the file and the type of the file. These pieces of information are set on the header of the response like this,

// get the filesystem module
const fs = require("fs");

// endpoint for /video
app.get("/video", (req, res) => {
  // create a read stream for the video hello.mp4
  const rs = fs.createReadStream("./videos/hello.mp4");

  // get size of the video file
  const { size } = fs.statSync("./videos/hello.mp4");

  // set header
  // including size of file and type of file
  res.setHeader("Content-Type", "video/mp4");
  re.setHeader("Content-Length", size);
});

Here we are setting the content type as video/mp4 and size of the file using the property size.

After setting the response headers now we can start streaming the video using the pipe() method available in the ReadableStream object rs and pass the Response object res as the argument to it, This is possible because The Response object itself is a WritableStream in Node.js.

// get the filesystem module
const fs = require("fs");

// endpoint for /video
app.get("/video", (req, res) => {
  // create a read stream for the video hello.mp4
  const rs = fs.createReadStream("./videos/hello.mp4");

  // get size of the video file
  const { size } = fs.statSync("./videos/hello.mp4");

  // set header
  // including size of file and type of file
  res.setHeader("Content-Type", "video/mp4");
  res.setHeader("Content-Length", size);

  // start streaming the video
  // using the pipe() method
  rs.pipe(res);
});

Now if you start the server and goes to the above endpoint in a browser, you can see that the video will start streaming in the browser.

Feel free to share if you found this useful 😃.

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