Basic Routing in ExpressJS

This was a bit hard to get at first

Hello There,

Lets talk about Routes. A Route is simply an entry point into your Application. Routes are very common, example of a route is http://apple.com/mac.

In my Previous Article we got to know how to set up our ExpressJS Application with a Structure which is good, but if you’re used to PHP Frameworks, for example Laravel, you would know that web routes are handled in a single file.

But in ExpressJS its a bit Different, so let’s flash Back to the Structure we currently have

Current Application Folder Structure

Our Attention would be on the routes directory and the app.js file.

Right now our application has two routes http://localhost:3000 and http://localhost:3000/users. So without much complication let’s create a route for food we are going to make a route for http://localhost:3000/food.

Lets Get Started

• Create a food.js file in the routes directory

Then, add these lines of code to food.js

• Open app.js in you root directory

Now Observe line 8 & 9 and 25 & 26

We are going to replicate these but in the food way in a new line like this……

When you’re sure you have these in your app.js file fire up Terminal, change directory to your express-practice folder and run npm start then visit http://localhost:3000

The Result

And you should be able to see the requests made in Terminal like this…

Requests Made shown in terminal

If you want to achieve something like http://localhost:3000/food/beans do the following:

• Open food.js in the routes directory

Modify your code like this

Now try loading http://localhost:3000/food/beans on your web browser, you would get an “Error 404: Not found”.

No need to panic, just restart your node server by pressing ctrl + c and running npm start again, when you do that you should have a flawless application.

P.S. Don’t mind the emoji

At this point you should have understood the basics of routing in ExpressJS, you can read up more on routing from the official documentation

Note

These articles are not intended to teach you everything about ExpressJS but to give you a basic understanding of how to work with it, so you are required to have basic understanding of programming.

Thank you for reading to this point, I would be working on the next chapter.

Bye.