I am currently working on a nodejs project, and I have a simple question. I want to serve some libraries from my node_modules folder statically to the client (maybe stupid, but not relevant to the question), but I dont want to trash my main server JS file with all these statically served files like this:

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

// Imports here
app.use('/assets/lib/bootstrap', './node_modules/bootstrap/dist');
app.use('/assets/lib/axios', './node_modules/axios/dist');
app.use('/assets/lib/aos', './node_modules/aos/dist');

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log('Server listening on port 3000');
});

If I have 10+ imports, this would trash up my Server JS file, which I like to keep as clean as possible. I was wondering why this option wouldn't work:

./routes/route1.js :

const express = require('express');
const router = express.Router();
const path = require('path');

// Imports here
router.use('/bootstrap', path.resolve(__dirname, 'node_modules/aos/dist'));
router.use('/axios', path.resolve(__dirname, 'node_modules/aos/dist'));
router.use('/aos', path.resolve(__dirname, 'node_modules/aos/dist'));

// path to node_modules file is not the problem here

module.exports = router

And in my main Server JS file:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const route1 = require('./routes/route1');

// Imports here
app.use('/assets/lib', route1); 

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log('Server listening on port 3000');
});

But this gives me an error. The file is not statically served to the client. Is this because an express Router can't serve static files? Maybe this is a rookie mistake, but any help is appreciated. The first code snippet does work, but I'm trying to keep my code organized.