Simple file based routing for Express

There are a bunch of best practices out there that recommend to split your Express.js routes into separate files using Express.Router().

But creating new routes this way isn't straightforward and requires quite a few lines of boilerplate code for each newly introduced endpoint.

// this is messy import express from "express" const router = express.Router() router.route("/") .get(async (req, res) => { ... }) export default router 

Fortunately, the framework era taught us better and popularized cleaner alternatives like file based routing.

Consider the following project structure:

├── app.ts // main file ├── routes ├── index.ts // index routes ├── posts ├── index.ts └── [id].ts // dynamic params └── users.ts └── package.json 

This approach can work for you out-of-the-box too!

npm install express-file-routing 

express-file-routing will transform all of your files inside /routes into valid paths.

• /routes/index.ts → /
• /routes/posts/index.ts → /posts
• /routes/posts/[id].ts → /posts/:id
• /routes/users.ts → /users

// app.ts import express from "express" import { router } from "express-file-routing" const app = express() app.use(router()) // /routes/users.ts export const get = async (req, res) => { res.json([]) } 

By default, exported functions like get, post, put, patch, del etc. will get matched their corresponding HTTP method automatically.

Adding middlewares is equally intuitive:

// /routes/posts.ts import { rateLimit, userAuth } from "../middlewares" export const post = [ rateLimit(), userAuth(), async (req, res) => { res.status(201).json({}) } ] 

See matthiaaas/express-file-routing on GitHub for detailed docs & a get started guide.