Using app.use to set up some routes in sails.js - node.js

Question

First of all, the context. I'm using agenda to schedule tasks in my sails.js app. Agenda starts in a hook, after orm and some other hook have finished. So far everything is good. Then I discovered agendash, a web interface to manage agenda tasks. And I don't manage to make it work with sails.js.
The problem is in following. This is how agendash should be used (from the doc):
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
// ... your other express middleware like body-parser
var Agenda = require('agenda');
var Agendash = require('agendash');
var agenda = new Agenda({mongo: 'mongodb://127.0.0.1/agendaDb'});
app.use('/agendash', Agendash(agenda));
And I can't find where I should put this. As I said, agenda is initialized in a hook, and then I save it as sails.agenda. So the only thing I really have to do is
app.use('/agendash', require('agendash')(sails.agenda))
But I'm not sure how I could add a new route like this, outside of routes.js (I cannot refer to sails in that file, it's undefined), and then protect this route with some policies (I want agendash to be available only to admin).
If I get it right, this line should be run only once, so I cannot put it in config.http as middleware. But otherwise the router of sails.js will overwrite the route (at least if I put sails.hooks.http.app.use('/agendash', require('agendash')(agenda)) in a hook, the route is not exposed).
So what should I do to make it work?

Answer 1

First you should not init agenda in a hook but in config/bootstrap.js which is executed once on startup. Then you create a file called config/myApp.js where you put your global variables:
/**
* Expose global variables.
*/
module.exports.myApp = {
agenda: null
};
In config/bootstrap.js you set this variable once:
var Agenda = require('agenda');
sails.config.myApp.agenda = new Agenda({mongo: 'mongodb://127.0.0.1/agendaDb'});
Now you have a reference to agenda and you can access from everywhere in your app using sails.config.myApp.agenda.
To register the agendash route you have to use a custom middelware as explained here How to use custom route middleware with Sails.js? (ExpressJS) and discussed here https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/issues/814

Answer 2

Ok, I found the solution by using the customMiddleware in config/http.js where I could do app.use, protect the route by middlewares and eventually call Agendash(agenda)(req, res, next).
For this to work I had to move agenda initialization out of the hook and put it inside customMiddleware. This is what my code looks like:
customMiddleware: function(app){
var Agenda = require("agenda");
var Agendash = require('agendash')
var agenda = new Agenda({db: {address: 'localhost:27017/dbName', collection: 'collectionName'}});
//protect the route with several policies
app.use('/agendash', function(req, res, next){
require('../api/policies/policy1')(req, res, function(){
require('../api/policies/policy2')(req, res, function(){
require('../api/policies/policy3')(req, res, function(){
Agendash(agenda)(req, res, next)
}
)
})
})
});
sails.agenda = agenda; //saving the reference
agenda.on('ready', function(){
var eventsToWaitFor = ['hook:orm:loaded', 'hook:email:loaded'];//if need to wait for some events before starting tasks
sails.after(eventsToWaitFor, function(){
require('./../api/services/jobs')(agenda);//loading all the jobs
agenda.on('fail', function(err, job){
//log error here
});
agenda.every('10 minutes', 'task1');//schedule tasks
agenda.every('10 minutes', 'task2');
agenda.start();//start agenda
});
})
}