TIL: Getting Parameters to Express Routes

Today I spent most of my time working on a new side project. The project, titled ute is a traffic generator template program to help quickly simulate REST traffic against a website.

The second part of this side project will be a management system for instances of ute running on various systems. The generator will probably sit in its current state for a bit while I’m able to get the management panel working like I want.

Anyways, while working on this project today, I finally found an answer to a question I’ve had for just about as long as I’ve been working with express: how do I get variables to my routes in external route files?

Well, the answer is to use the app.set() command to set a parameter on the app (or whatever variable you used) associated with your express app. This value is actually accessible now through the req.app object over in the route!

And if you want to pass a value back to the main application? You can use res.app.set() to set a value and send it back to be accessible back in the main app.

I’m not sure why this never came up in any course or tutorial I did, seems like some pretty good knowledge to know…

💚