Can I serve static files while providing an API for the server?

So I'm pretty new to web development and now that me and my much more web oriented friend started a project, he threw all kind of frameworks on me. We're doing Vuejs, jade, stylus, and jeet. For a newcomer, this is of course very confusing as no Vuejs examples uses jade, no jade examples uses vuejs, etc.

However, for this project we need a backend which can handle api calls to Google maps, saving stuff, etc. Neither of us have experience doing this and I tried to build it in Rust and got it all working with the api part but I couldn't manage to serve the files, leading to us trying a http-server serving the files and then making api calls to the Rust backend from the client. This led to problems as we had to do CORS requests (?) which I didn't get to work.

Sorry for the long background, it all boils down to the question: How do I serve static files while having the possibility to make api calls to Google Maps and store stuff in a database? All examples I find seems to assume that you're using templates to generate the files served to the end user?

How do I attack this problem? My friend has finished most of the frontend and it works simply by using the npm package "http-server"