How to programmatically send a 404 response with Express/Node?

Updated Answer for Express 4.x

Rather than using res.send(404) as in old versions of Express, the new method is:

res.sendStatus(404);

Express will send a very basic 404 response with "Not Found" text:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
X-Powered-By: Express
Vary: Origin
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 9
ETag: W/"9-nR6tc+Z4+i9RpwqTOwvwFw"
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:08:19 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

Not Found

You don't have to simulate it. The second argument to res.send I believe is the status code. Just pass 404 to that argument.

Let me clarify that: Per the documentation on expressjs.org it seems as though any number passed to res.send() will be interpreted as the status code. So technically you could get away with:

res.send(404);

Edit: My bad, I meant res instead of req. It should be called on the response

Edit: As of Express 4, the send(status) method has been deprecated. If you're using Express 4 or later, use: res.sendStatus(404) instead. (Thanks @badcc for the tip in the comments)

According to the site I'll post below, it's all how you set up your server. One example they show is this:

var http = require("http");
var url = require("url");

function start(route, handle) {
  function onRequest(request, response) {
    var pathname = url.parse(request.url).pathname;
    console.log("Request for " + pathname + " received.");

    route(handle, pathname, response);
  }

  http.createServer(onRequest).listen(8888);
  console.log("Server has started.");
}

exports.start = start;

and their route function:

function route(handle, pathname, response) {
  console.log("About to route a request for " + pathname);
  if (typeof handle[pathname] === 'function') {
    handle[pathname](response);
  } else {
    console.log("No request handler found for " + pathname);
    response.writeHead(404, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
    response.write("404 Not found");
    response.end();
  }
}

exports.route = route;

This is one way. http://www.nodebeginner.org/

From another site, they create a page and then load it. This might be more of what you're looking for.

fs.readFile('www/404.html', function(error2, data) {
            response.writeHead(404, {'content-type': 'text/html'});
            response.end(data);
        });

http://blog.poweredbyalt.net/?p=81

From the Express site, define a NotFound exception and throw it whenever you want to have a 404 page OR redirect to /404 in the below case:

function NotFound(msg){
  this.name = 'NotFound';
  Error.call(this, msg);
  Error.captureStackTrace(this, arguments.callee);
}

NotFound.prototype.__proto__ = Error.prototype;

app.get('/404', function(req, res){
  throw new NotFound;
});

app.get('/500', function(req, res){
  throw new Error('keyboard cat!');
});

IMO the nicest way is to use the next() function:

router.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
    var err = new Error('Not found');
    err.status = 404;
    return next(err);
}

Then the error is handled by your error handler and you can style the error nicely using HTML.