How to include CSS files in EJS View Engine?

Last Updated : 28 Apr, 2025

Including CSS files is important for styling web pages in web development with Node.js, Express, and EJS. In this article, we will explore the process of including CSS in such projects to enhance the visual appeal and user experience.

Approach to include CSS file in EJS:

We're building a Node.js web application using Express and EJS.
Our project includes a basic webpage styled with CSS.
We've set up routes to render EJS templates, ensuring the text content is centered within a styled container.

Steps to Include CSS files in EJS:

Step 1: let's create a new Node.js project. Open your terminal and run the following commands:

mkdir nodejs-express-ejs
cd nodejs-express-ejs
npm init -y

Step 2: Install dependencies for our project using the following command in the terminal.

Express is a web application framework for Node.js
EJS is a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript.

npm install express ejs

Step 3: After setting up the Node environment on your system, we can start by creating a server.js file and create two directories by the names of Views in which we will write our EJS fil,es and Public in which we will write the CSS files.

Project Structure:

Screenshot-2024-02-26-121838 — Project Structure

The updated dependencies in the package.json file will look like this.

"dependencies": {
    "ejs": "^3.1.9",
    "express": "^4.18.2"
}

Example: Here, we will demonstrate how to include CSS files using Node.js, Express, and EJS

JavaScript

//server.js

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

// Set EJS as the view engine
app.set('view engine', 'ejs');

// Serve static files from the 'public' directory
app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public')));

// Route for rendering the index.ejs template
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    res.render('index');
});

// Start the server
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;
app.listen(PORT, () => {
    console.log(
        `Server is running on 
            http://localhost:${PORT}`
    );
});

HTML

<!-- views/index.ejs -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" 
          content="width=device-width, 
                   initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>
        Node.js Express EJS Example
    </title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" 
        type="text/css" 
        href="/css/style.css">
</head>

<body>
    <div class="container">
        <h1>
            Welcome to Geeks
            for Geeks
        </h1>
        <p>
            This is a basic example of
            including css files to ejs
        </p>
    </div>
</body>

</html>