Getting Start with Express 4.x – Routes Basics – Tutorial 2

In this blog post we will see what are express routes and how to use them

Routes are basically used to decide which code should get execute when a particular URL gets opened.
So when we open/fetch different urls or different paths, based on the routes setup in express we can specify different logic to be executed.

If you come from a MVC background, routes is similar to controller. But since express doesn’t follow MVC this a very rough analogy.

You will find this code already in your “helloworld” application or the bare application generated using express-generator

var routes = require('./routes/index');
var users = require('./routes/users');
app.use('/', routes);
app.use('/users', users);

In this we are using two files routes/index.js, routes/users.js and telling express to use index.js for “/” and users.js for “/users” base urls

In index.js code goes like

router.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.render('index', { title: 'Express' });
});

So what this does is quite simple, for a GET request on ‘http://127.0.0.1:3000/’, we can write the code which should be executed.
Similarly, users.js will execute only for URLs which have ‘http://127.0.0.1:3000/users’ as the base path.

Similar other basic route types would be e.g in index.js we could add

//index.js
router.post('/', function(req, res) {
  var post_body = req.body;
  console.log(post_body);
  res.render('index', { title: 'POST Request' });
});

//index.js
//this will respond to http://127.0.0.1:3000/about
router.get('/about', function(req, res) {
  res.render('index', { title: 'Express' });
});

//users.js
//this will respond to http://127.0.0.1:3000/list
router.get('/list', function(req, res) {
  res.render('index', { title: 'User List' });
});

This is a tutorial on very basic routing in express, will see more advanced routing in further tutorials.

Experiment
1. Create a new route for url http://127.0.0.1/users/account/createPassword
2. Create a new route for url http://127.0.0.1/catalog/product/view

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