pyrouter

Routing in Action

A route is a map from a URL path to a controller.

For example, suppose you want to match any URL like /blog/my-post or /blog/all-about-cats and send it to a controller that can look up and render that blog entry info. The route is simple:

...
routes = {
    'blog_show': {
        'path':       '/blog/{slug}',
        'methods':    ['GET'],
        'controller': 'myapplication.blog.BlogController'
    }
}
...

The path defined by the blog_show route acts like /blog/* where the wildcard is given the name slug. For the URL /blog/my-blog-post, the slug variable gets a value of my-blog-post, which is available for you to use in your controller (keep reading). The blog_show is the internal name of the route, which doesn't have any meaning yet and just needs to be unique. Later, you'll use it to generate URLs.

The controller parameter is a special key that tells pyrouter which controller should be executed when a URL matches this route. The controller string value point to a specific python module > class:

Congratulations! You've just created your first route and connected it to a controller. Now, when you visit /blog/my-post, the action method of the myapplication.blog.BlogController class will be executed and the slug variable will be equal to my-post.

This is the goal of the pyrouter: to map the URL of a request to a controller. Along the way, you'll learn all sorts of tricks that make mapping even the most complex URLs easy.

Customizing the path matching Requirements

Creating Routes

Customizing the action method name of the controller class

Adding HTTP Method Requirements

In addition to the URL, you can also match on the method of the incoming request (i.e. GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE). Suppose you have a contact form with two controllers - one for displaying the form info (on a GET request) and one for processing the form when it's submitted (on a POST request). This can be accomplished with the following route configuration:

...
routes = {
    'contact': {
        'path':       '/contact',
        'methods':    ['GET'],
        'controller': 'myapplication.main.ContactController'
    },
    'contact_process': {
        'path':       '/contact',
        'methods':    ['POST'],
        'controller': 'myapplication.main.ContactProcessController'
    }
}
...

Despite the fact that these two routes have identical paths (/contact), the first route will match only GET requests and the second route will match only POST requests. This means that you can display the form info and submit the form via the same URL, while using distinct controllers for the two actions.

'methods': ['GET']

'methods': ['GET', 'POST']

Adding Protocol Requirements to use HTTPS or HTTP

Sometimes, you want to secure some routes and be sure that they are only accessed via the HTTPS protocol.

This can be accomplished with the following route configuration:

routes = {
    'contact': {
        'path':       '/contact',
        'controller': 'myapplication.main.ContactController',
        'protocols':  ['https']
    }
}

'protocols': ['http']

'protocols': ['http', 'https']

Adding Host Requirements

Configuring the Dispatcher

Controllers Dependencies