[NJS] Routing

Express offers a really easy routing system, which is the main selling point:

var app = require('express')()
app.use('/', require('./routes/routes'))

This will delegate all routing to the routes.js file, inside the routes folder, at the root level. Here, we delegate individual routes to their specific files, but declaring routes will be just as easy:

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

router.use('/privacy-policy', require('./privacy-policy'))
router.use('*', function(req, res) { // req stands for request, res for response
  res.render('not-found') // This is the 404 page, and should be the last route
})

module.exports = router

I picked the privacy policy route as an example, because you can download the policy in md format, so we'll cover nested routes and serving files in one go:

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

router.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.render('privacy-policy')
})

router.get('/download', function(req, res) {
  res.download('./assets/files/Privacy Policy.md', 'Roland Leth Privacy Policy.md')
})

module.exports = router

Because we got here from router.use('/privacy-policy), / just means the root of the current route, which will resolve to rolandleth.com/privacy-policy, the second get resolving to rolandleth.com/privacy-policy/download, respectively.

The res.download's first parameter is the file to server, and the second parameter is the name that the resource will be saved with.

Next time we'll talk about layouts.