Lost Track of All Your Express Routes And Middlewares?!

Are your app.use(...), app.METHOD(...), app.route(...), and express.Router() calls spread across your codebase and it’s starting to get difficult to keep track of them all?

express-print-routes prints the tree of all your Express routes and middlewares to a file.

You get this for example:

router                                                                                                         
 ├── query                            *                                                           
 ├── expressInit                      *                                                           
 ├── logger                           *                                                           
 ├── hpp                              *                                                           
 ├── router                           /^\/api\/?(?=\/|$)/                                         
 │   router                                                                                                    
 │    ├── bound dispatch              /users/:id             GET
 │    │    └── __getUser              /                      GET
 │    │   
 │    └── bound dispatch              /users/:id             POST
 │         ├── __checkAccessRights    /                      POST
 │         └── __updateUser           /                      POST
 │        
 │   
 ├── serveStatic                      *                                                           
 └── __handleError                    *                                                           

Installation

This is a module for node.js and is installed via npm:

npm install express-print-routes --save-dev

Usage

Call express-print-routes after you registered all your routes / middlewares:

var app = express()

// Register all your routes / middlewares


if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') { // Only in dev environment

    // Absolute path to output file
    var path = require('path')
    var filepath = path.join(__dirname, '../docs/routes.generated.txt')

    // Invoke express-print-routes
    require('express-print-routes')(app, filepath)
    
}

Consider giving your middlewares names when they appear as <anonymous>. Often, they are added as anonymous functions like this:

app.use(function (req, res, next) {
    console.log('Hello world!')
    next()
})

Give the middleware a name like this:

app.use(function __helloWorld(req, res, next) { // <-- '__helloWorld' will be printed now 
    console.log('Hello world!')
    next()
})

Why printing to a file and not just to the console?

It is good practice to commit the generated file to your version control system. This way you can review all changes like added / renamed / removed routes and added / removed middlewares.

Contributing

To set up your development environment for express-print-routes:

1. Clone this repo to your desktop,
2. in the shell cd to the main folder,
3. hit npm install,
4. hit npm install gulp -g if you haven't installed gulp globally yet, and
5. run gulp dev. (Or run node ./node_modules/.bin/gulp dev if you don't want to install gulp globally.)

gulp dev watches all source files and if you save some changes it will lint the code and execute all tests. The test coverage report can be viewed from ./coverage/lcov-report/index.html.

If you want to debug a test you should use gulp test-without-coverage to run all tests without obscuring the code by the test coverage instrumentation.

Change History

• v1.0.0 (2016-05-01)
  • Initial version

License (ISC)

In case you never heard about the ISC license it is functionally equivalent to the MIT license.

See the LICENSE file for details.