Why does my swig template not render in my MEAN web app?

I am trying to learn the MEAN stack along with Swig templates. I’m coding from scratch, as I tried a MEAN framework but it generated a lot of files and it was too much for me to begin with.

Currently my Swig template index.html does not render the HTML. This is the output I am getting:

{% include 'header.html' %} 
<br>Welcome to my test website

where as I am expecting following

This is coming from Header
<br>Welcome to my test website

Why is it not rendering?

Following is my folder structure:

--config
 -config.js
--node_modules
 -* //modules installed via npm link
--public
 -header.html
 -index.html
-package.json
-routes.js
-server.js

Below is the content of each file

config.js

var port = process.env.PORT || 8080;

module.exports = {
    dburl: 'mongodb://localhost/test',
    port: port,
    templateEngine: 'swig'
}

header.html

<head lang="en">
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p> This is coming from Header</p>

index.html

{% include 'header.html' %}
<p>Welcome to my test website</p>
</body>

package.json

{
    "name": "test",
    "version": "0.0.1",
    "author": "Rukmaj Chandavar",
    "dependencies": {
        "express": "*",
        "mongoose": "*",
        "angular": "*",
        "swig": "*",
        "consolidate": "*"
    }
}

routes.js

module.exports = function(app){
    app.get('*',function(req, res){
        res.send('index.html');
    });
}

server.js

var express = require("express");
var app = express();
var mongoose = require("mongoose");
var config = require('./config/config');
var swig = require('swig');
var cons = require('consolidate');

mongoose.connect(config.dburl);

app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));

app.set('views', __dirname + '/public');
app.engine('html', cons.swig);
app.set('view engine', 'html');


require('./routes') (app);

app.listen(config.port);
console.log('MeriDawat running on port ' + config.port)

Following are the version numbers of installed node modules

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

I would appreciate any help in troubleshooting this to help me move forward. Thanks in advance.

Solution

I think this is the offending line, in routes.js:

res.send('index.html');

res.send() just sends the contents of the file back in the HTTP response.

To render a template and send the rendered results back, you want res.render() instead:

res.render('index.html')