As we’ve already learnt, the basic approach to routing can make our server.js unreadable in bigger projects. In this chapter we’ll get to know a slightly better way to do it (spoiler alert: there’s an EVEN better version, but we’ll get to that later).
To keep our server.js nice and clean, it’s usually better to handle routing in a dedicated place
For that we create a routes.js in our project-root with the following content:
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| var express = require('express');
var router = express.Router();
router.get('/', function (req, res) {
res.sendFile('index.html', { root: 'views' });
});
router.get('/login', function (req, res) {
res.sendFile('login.html', { root: 'views' });
});
router.post('/login', function (req, res) {
console.log('Username: ' + req.body.username);
console.log('Password: ' + req.body.password);
res.redirect('/');
});
module.exports = router;
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Notice that the routes themselves are just copied and pasted with ‘app’ being replaced by ‘router’
Now we have to remove all the routes from our server.js and tell it to use our new routes.js.
The final result will look like this:
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| // Include a bunch of stuff
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var http = require('http').Server(app);
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false }));
// Include our router-file
var routes = require('./routes.js');
// Let it handle all requests
app.use('/', routes);
// Start a server that listens to port 8080
http.listen(8080, function () {
console.log('listening on *:8080');
});
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While this is already a lot better and makes the server.js a lot more readable, we would still end up with one huge file for all the requests.
This is where controllers come in…
