express-autoregister

Automatic route registration for Express based NodeJS applications, using folder structure to map parent paths for routes.

Installation

To install:

npm install --save express-autoregister

Usage

When initializing your express application:

const appRoot = require('app-root-path');
const autoregister = require('express-autoregister');
const path = require('path');

... much code, such happy ...

app.use(autoregister({
  routes: path.join(appRoot.toString(), '/routes')
});

Conventions

It is assumed that /routes in the example above is an appplication-root relative folder. Inside that folder, there might be folders such as:

/api
    /status
        default.js

Where default.js contains:

const router = require('express').Router();
router.get('/', (req, res, next) => {
    res.render('index'); // Assumes handlebars or similar
});

module.exports = router;

The autoregister library will then create this path as:

`http://<base-url>/api/status`

In short, you can now avoid all the require() work needed to nest up your routing for Express. This allows you to change operation structures very easily during development.

Routes are pathed relative to their parent directory

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot on Windows:

SET DEBUG=express-autoregister

On Mac/Linux:

export DEBUG=express-autoregister

This will produce debug output such as:

express-autoregister Starting automatic route registration +0ms
express-autoregister    Starting directory /Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes +4ms
express-autoregister    Router is the root, no parent-attach. +1ms
express-autoregister    Recursing child: help +1ms
express-autoregister       Starting directory /Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes/help +0ms
express-autoregister       Router is a child of a parent, attaching under path: /help +0ms
express-autoregister       Loading JS module via require(/Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes/help/index.js) +1ms
express-autoregister       Appending route to hierarchy +1ms
express-autoregister       Finished directory /Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes/help +0ms
express-autoregister    Recursing child: help +0ms
express-autoregister       Starting directory /Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes/help +0ms
express-autoregister       Router is a child of a parent, attaching under path: /help +0ms
express-autoregister       Loading JS module via require(/Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes/help/index.js) +1ms
express-autoregister       Appending route to hierarchy +0ms
express-autoregister       Finished directory /Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes/help +0ms
express-autoregister    Finished directory /Users/steveg/Desktop/workspace/linehaul/linehaul-web/src/routes +0ms
express-autoregister Route mapping completed +0ms

This will allow you to see what is happening and why.

Contributions

Licensed under the MIT license. Please submit improvments as Github issues.