A developer's Blog Log #5

A re-re-iterated version of compiled notes & learning

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Blog # 5, Creating a Route...cont...

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Inside app.js should look something like this

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.listen(3000);

Now let's get back to learning how to create routes in express

To create a route, I will use the get method on the app object

The get method is used to handle the get requests to a certain URL

For this example, we're going to create a route for the root route for our app

In other words, this is the route to follow if a visitor just visits our site without specifying a particular folder or file

For example, when you type in teamtreehouse.com you get treehouse's root route.

Then if I go to Stories, which is teamtreehouse.com/stories, you get the Success Stories for some of their students.

The root route is also one we visited when we got the 404

To indicate the site's root route we use the slash as the first parameter.

The first parameter is sometimes called the location parameter.

The second parameter of the get method is going to be an anonymous callback function.

This function is going to take two parameters, a request object And a response object.

This callback will run when the client requests this route.

We'll talk more about the request and response objects throughout this course.

For now, we're going to use the response's send method.

The send method sends a string to the client.

Now when we refresh the page, you notice we still get an error.

The reason is because even though we changed our code,

the express server is still serving up the old code.

The express server needs to be restarted to apply the new route, and the changes we've made

We can do this from the command line by hitting

CNTL + C

to stop the server

Since the server is stopped, we'll need to start it back up the same way we did the first time.

When we visit local host 3000 now, we see our application now works.

One more thing, if you don't have nodemon installed yet,

It is recommended that you do that for this course.

We'll be using it throughout this course to restart the express server.

It's also generally a good thing to have on hand for node development.

Without it, you'd be restarting the server every time you made a change to your code

which can get really old, really fast. To install it, just type npm

install -g nodemon

And hit Enter