Creating Express Routes

Routing

We use Express for our API routing. Express makes it really easy to declare and handle new routes.

Let's use the authentication routes as an example.

Declaring a Route

To create a route, we need a reference to the router, which we can get by simply importing it

var router = require('express').Router()

Now, we can declare our route

router.post('/login', function (req, res) {
    // Route Handler
});

Sending Responses

Without actually responding to the request, the client will be left hanging. Luckily, it's easy to respond with Express.

res.send({
    status: true
});

This is a decent response for a successful login request, but how do we handle errors?

res.status(401).send({
    status: false,
    message: Responses.USER_EXISTS
});

Here we send back a 401 status code as well as an error message. Our practice for sending messages back to the client is to have a dedicated place in the /responses/ folder. This is a nice abstraction for common messages.

It is important to have a good response back to the user.

Exporting the Router

Finally, we must export our router like we do everything else

module.exports = router;

Exposing the Route

In api.js, we declare our handlers for groups of routes. Following our authentication example, we are putting all those routes into the authHandler.

var authHandler = require('./api/auth.js'); // auth.js is where /login is declared

We can now tell our router to namespace these routes in a way.

router.user('/auth', authHandler);

Now, all requests with /auth as a prefix will be directed to the authHandler.