Plug.Router

A DSL to define a routing algorithm that works with Plug.

It provides a set of macros to generate routes. For example:

defmodule AppRouter do
  use Plug.Router

  plug :match
  plug :dispatch

  get "/hello" do
    send_resp(conn, 200, "world")
  end

  match _ do
    send_resp(conn, 404, "oops")
  end
end

Each route needs to return a connection, as per the Plug spec. A catch-all match is recommended to be defined as in the example above, otherwise routing fails with a function clause error.

The router is itself a plug, which means it can be invoked as:

AppRouter.call(conn, AppRouter.init([]))

Notice the router contains a plug pipeline and by default it requires two plugs: match and dispatch. match is responsible for finding a matching route which is then forwarded to dispatch. This means users can easily hook into the router mechanism and add behaviour before match, before dispatch or after both.

Routes

get "/hello" do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "world")
end

In the example above, a request will only match if it is a GET request and the route is “/hello”. The supported HTTP methods are get, post, put, patch, delete and options.

A route can also specify parameters which will then be available in the function body:

get "/hello/:name" do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "hello #{name}")
end

Routes allow for globbing which will match the remaining parts of a route and can be available as a parameter in the function body. Also note that a glob can’t be followed by other segments:

get "/hello/*_rest" do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "matches all routes starting with /hello")
end

get "/hello/*glob" do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "route after /hello: #{inspect glob}")
end

Finally, a general match function is also supported:

match "/hello" do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "world")
end

A match will match any route regardless of the HTTP method. Check match/3 for more information on how route compilation works and a list of supported options.

Error handling

In case something goes wrong in a request, the router by default will crash, without returning any response to the client. This behaviour can be configured in two ways, by using two different modules:

• Plug.ErrorHandler - allows the developer to customize exactly which page is sent to the client via the handle_errors/2 function;

• Plug.Debugger - automatically shows debugging and request information about the failure. This module is recommended to be used only in a development environment.

Here is an example of how both modules could be used in an application:

defmodule AppRouter do
  use Plug.Router

  if Mix.env == :dev do
    use Plug.Debugger
  end

  use Plug.ErrorHandler

  plug :match
  plug :dispatch

  get "/hello" do
    send_resp(conn, 200, "world")
  end

  defp handle_errors(conn, %{kind: _kind, reason: _reason, stack: _stack}) do
    send_resp(conn, conn.status, "Something went wrong")
  end
end

Routes compilation

All routes are compiled to a match function that receives three arguments: the method, the request path split on / and the connection. Consider this example:

match "/foo/bar", via: :get do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "hello world")
end

It is compiled to:

defp match("GET", ["foo", "bar"], conn) do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "hello world")
end

This opens up a few possibilities. First, guards can be given to match:

match "/foo/:bar" when size(bar) <= 3, via: :get do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "hello world")
end

Second, a list of split paths (which is the compiled result) is also allowed:

match ["foo", bar], via: :get do
  send_resp(conn, 200, "hello world")
end

After a match is found, the block given as do/end is stored as a function in the connection. This function is then retrieved and invoked in the dispatch plug.