Basic Locally Hosted Web-server Functionality

I am working on an addition to a project to create dynamic HTML reports from data that is stored in a SQLite database. Initially, I tried to do everything client-side using things like browserify and sql.js, but I ran into a lot of issues trying to read from the .db file locally.

For that reason, I have now decided to spin up a very basic web server that will be locally hosted. Essentially, I want the user to be able to navigate to http://localhost:3000 and hit a landing page which is the home page of the report.

I have set up a very basic HTTP server using express with the following code running in node:

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

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

app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000);

This works fine, and exposes the /public directory on port 3000, which has a placeholder index.html as of right now. My problem is, that when I try to start adding my code that reads from the SQLite database, none of the necessary require() functions work (specifically, require('fs'), due to it not being defined.

At a basic level, my question boils down to this:

How can i have the ability to read from the SQLite database file in the HTML/Javascript pages that live on the webserver? Whenever I try to use the necessary functions, it tells me that require() is not defined, or other similar errors.

Any help would be appreciated.