Render basic HTML view?

You can have jade include a plain HTML page:

in views/index.jade

include plain.html

in views/plain.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
...

and app.js can still just render jade:

res.render(index)

From the Express.js Guide: View Rendering

View filenames take the form Express.ENGINE, where ENGINE is the name of the module that will be required. For example the view layout.ejs will tell the view system to require('ejs'), the module being loaded must export the method exports.render(str, options) to comply with Express, however app.register() can be used to map engines to file extensions, so that for example foo.html can be rendered by jade.

So either you create your own simple renderer or you just use jade:

 app.register('.html', require('jade'));

More about app.register.

Note that in Express 3, this method is renamed app.engine


Many of these answers are out of date.

Using express 3.0.0 and 3.1.0, the following works:

app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
app.engine('html', require('ejs').renderFile);

See the comments below for alternative syntax and caveats for express 3.4+:

app.set('view engine', 'ejs');

Then you can do something like:

app.get('/about', function (req, res)
{
    res.render('about.html');
});

This assumes you have your views in the views subfolder, and that you have installed the ejs node module. If not, run the following on a Node console:

npm install ejs --save