Add All Routes in ./routes to Middleware Stack - node.js

Question

Right now I am using app.use() and require() for each route in my routes directory to add them to the middleware stack (I am using Express).
app.use('/', require('./routes/index'));
app.use('/users', require('./routes/users'));
app.use('/post', require('./routes/post'));
app.use('/submitPost', require('./routes/submitPost'));
...
Instead of doing this manually for each file, I would like to use a for-loop to iterate through the route files in ./routes and add each file to the middleware stack. This is what I have, but it isn't working:
require('fs').readdir('/routes', function (err, files) {
if (!err) {
for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
var file = files[i].substr(files[i].lastIndexOf('.'));
app.use('/' + file, require('./routes/' + file));
}
}
});
Could someone help me correct this bit of code. On another note, are there any disadvantages to automatically adding all routes in ./routes to the middleware stack?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The main issue here is probably when you are adding the middleware. You are using readdir - the asynchronous method. You likely have a catch-all 404 handler declared after your code, and as the routes you are requiring are added asynchronously, they will probably be added after the catch-all. When the request propagates through the middleware, this would terminate it before it even got to the route.
One other issue is the path you are using: /routes will attempt to look in the route of your filesystem. ./routes or __dirname + '/routes' is probaby what you want.
The following code sample works for me:
var files = require('fs').readdirSync('./routes')
for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
var file = files[i].substr(0, files[i].lastIndexOf('.'));
app.use('/' + file, require('./routes/' + file));
}

Answer 2

By the way, you can use file-manifest for this. It was actually created specifically for this use case, although it still expects you to call app.use yourself, since order matters for express routes.
So you can do something like:
var fm = require('file-manifest');
var routes = fm.generate('./routes');
app.use('/', routes.home);
app.use('/foo', routes.foo);
// etc.
If you really want it to all happen magically, you could make that work with a custom reduce function, but this is much more explicit and ensures that routes are set up in the right order (so you don't end up with /foo falling before /foo/bar and preventing it from being reached).
I believe I am supposed to qualify that I wrote this library.

Answer 3

There are a few ways to do this. Here's a clean implentation using the basic fs and path modules.
var fs = require("fs"),
path = require("path");
var root = "./routes/"
fs.readdir(root, function (err, files) {
if (err) {
throw err;
}
files.forEach(function (file) {
var filename = file.slice(0, -3);
var routePath = '/' + ((filename === 'index') ? '' : filename); //filter index to use just '/'
app.use(routepath, require(root + filename));
});
});