Nodemon & Routes Folder

So right now, we have to keep restarting our app everytime we make a change. This is not ideal. We can use a package called nodemon to automatically restart our app when we make changes.

Let's install as a dev dependency:

npm install -D nodemon

Now, in your package.json file, you can add a script to run your app with nodemon:

"scripts": {
  "start": "node server.js",
  "dev": "nodemon server.js"
}

From now on, in development, you can run npm run dev to start your app with nodemon and you will not have to restart your app everytime you make a change.

Cleaning up the routes

Right now we have our idea routes in the main server.js file. This is not ideal. We should move them to a separate file. Let's create a new folder called routes and inside that folder, create a new file called ideas.js.

In order to use the Express router, we need to import it:

const express = require('express');
const router = express.Router();

Now, we can move our ideas and idea routes to this file. We do have to make a couple changes to the routes. We are using the router now, so we need to change the app.get() to router.get(). We also need to change the paths from /api/ideas to / because we are already in the /api/ideas route. The single idea route will be /:id because we are already in the /api/ideas route.

Lastly, we need to export the router (I always forget this 🤨):

module.exports = router;

Hook up routes folder

Now we need to hook up the routes folder. In your server.js, you can remove the 2 idea routes and add the following:

const ideasRouter = require('./routes/ideas');
app.use('/api/ideas', ideasRouter);

app.use is a way to add middleware to your app. In this case, we are adding the ideasRouter middleware to the /api/ideas route. This means that all the routes in the ideasRouter will be prefixed with /api/ideas automatically.

So now the api should work the same as before, but we have a cleaner server.js file. You can go ahead and test out the /api/ideas and /api/ideas/:id routes in postman.

In the next lesson, we will make it so that we can add ideas with a POST request.