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.