koa-trail

koa-trail

Trail is a router for koa with the option to explicitly execute multiple routes on a single request (similar to express routing).

For example, instead of:

var koa = require('koa');
var trail = require('koa-trail');

var app = koa();
app.use(trail(app));

function authenticate *(next) {
  // ... authenticate the API token
  if (!user)
    this.throw(403, 'API Token Invalid');
  else
    yield next
}

// chain the authenticate on every route 
app.get('/api/users', authenticate, apiController.getUsers);
app.get('/api/profile/:userId', authenticate, apiController.getProfile);
app.get('/api/page/:pageId', authenticate, apiController.getPage);
app.put('/api/:contentId/like', authenticate, apiController.likeContent);

app.listen(3000);

We can simply apply the authentication handler once on a wildcard route:

app.all('/api/*', authenticate);

// the above route will be called before of any of the below routes matching /api/*
// therefore, we don't need to explicitly chain it on each route.

app.get('/api/users', apiController.getUsers);
app.get('/api/profile/:userId', apiController.getProfile);
app.get('/api/page/:pageId', apiController.getPage);
app.put('/api/:contentId/like', apiController.likeContent);

This reduces chaining on individual routes, and may improve security since there is less likelihood of a developer forgetting to add important security middleware on certain routes.

This middleware is largely inspired by koa-router. The reason for building a new router is that they explicitly decided not to allow the route chaining behavior outlined above.

More documentation and features will be coming soon... this is a work in progress.