Autostrada

article published on 28^th October 2019 (last modification on 1^st August 2022)

The vast majority of web servers have a www directory containing static files. Node.js servers are no exception. The problem with these is that file routing is done "manually"; each file must be associated with an URL (yes I didn't know about Express static). As it was a recurring problem in my projects, I decided to create an NPM module that handles routing once and for all: Autostrada.

Routing is done dynamically. That is, if a file is added or deleted, the routing will be automatically updated without the need to restart the server.

Thanks to this module, only 4 lines are enough to run a static web server:

const app = require('express')();
const autostrada = require('autostrada')();

app.use(autostrada);
app.listen(80);

However, nothing prevents us from complicating things a little bit. For example, the following code associates file paths like /xxx/yyy/index.html to the URLs /xxx/yyy/ and /xxx/yyy. As well as the file paths like /xxx/yyy/zzz.html to the URL /xxx/yyy/zzz.

const app = require('express')();
const autostrada = require('autostrada')({
	fromPathToUrl: path => {
		if (path.match(/^((.*)\/)index\.html$/)) return [RegExp.$1, RegExp.$2];
		if (path.match(/^(.*)\.html$/)) return RegExp.$1;
		return path;
	}
});

app.use(autostrada);
app.listen(80);

This is not the only option of the module, but for more details I invite you to visit the NPM page.