Routtl (pronounced rout·le)

Lightweight routing primitives.

WIP, don't use in production. Expect occasional breaking changes until we hit stable in 1.0.0.

Usage

import { route, string } from 'routtl';

const helloRoute = route`/hello/${['world', string]}`;

const url = helloRoute.encode({ world: 'world' });
//     ^ '/hello/world'

const data = helloRoute.decode('/hello/world');
//     ^ { world: 'world' }

Overview

Routtl is a small set of primitives for defining routes and encoding/decoding data to/from that route. It is small (less than 500kb of JS), has no dependencies, and provides type-safe decoding. It uses JavaScript's tagged template literals to provide a declarative, composable API for defining routes.

Decoders

Default decoders are provided for primitive JS types (e.g. string, number, boolean, date). A simple Decoder interface is provided to extend or build your own decoding. Additionally, a decoder factory is provided for arrays of arbitrary types.

Templating HTML

When templating HTML, you have use route.encode() to generate a href for an <a>. Here is an example using lit-html as a template engine:

import { route, string } from 'routtl';
import { render, html } from 'lit-html';

const helloRoute = route`/hello/${['world', string]}`;

const url = helloRoute.encode({ world: 'world' });

render(document.body, html`<a href="${url}">Link</a>`);

Composing

RouteParsers can be composed together as shown here:

import { route, string } from 'routtl';

const helloRoute = route`/hello`;

const worldRoute = route`${helloRoute}/world/${['id', string]}`;

const url = helloRoute.encode({ id: 'foo' });
//     ^ '/hello/world/foo'

Roadmap

• [x] Built-in decoders
• [x] Decoder type safely
• [x] Nest Route Parsers
• [ ] Decode query parameters
• [ ] Ignore case and other options

Contributing

See the guide.

Inspiration

Lots of inspiration for this project! @ncthbrt was crucial to the early prototypes. vue-router, navaid, typesafe-routes have been influential in the design of these primitives.

There is allow an API called URLPattern that has recently emerged from the WHATWG standards body that addresses some of the problems routtle is solving. At the time of this writing most browsers besides Firefox and Safari support it and a polyfill is available.