List All Routes in express app

[bryanCoteChang]

Hi! I've been fighting this for a bit, but I'm trying to gather a list of all of the endpoints in our express applications. I've tried 'express-list-router' and the code below, but none give the full paths of the endpoint and the allowed methods to use them. I've read the documentation, but can't seem to find the properties/methods to access this information. Thank you in advance for your time and assistance!

[dougwilson]

It is not possible to get a fill list with the built-in router. Since paths are regular expression-based, there is no easy way in which to reverse them into a path.

[bryanCoteChang]

Hmmm, I'm auditing a public facing application. Tons of repos and submodules, it would be almost laughable to do it manually. Is my only option then to catch them downstream via: req.method and req.originalUrl?

[bryanCoteChang]

**Creative and/or potentially crazy solutions are welcome :)

[dougwilson]

There is no general solution that would guarantee you are not missing anything. Is it possible to share the app at all? We could at least see what kind of structure the program is using to see if it's possible at all. What you posted at first is a pretty simplistic method, and if that's not giving what you're looking for, it's hard to really understand why without seeing something.

[bryanCoteChang]

O I think I can share my sandbox app! (Way less code anyway.) Two main datapoints I'm trying to capture:

• All routes directly declared to the app.
• All routes declared through router(s).

Sandbox:

var expressListRoutes   = require('express-list-routes'),
    express             = require('express'),
    router              = express.Router();

var app = express();
 
app.use('/api/v1', router);

app.get('/', function(req, res){
  res.send('hello world');
});
 
router.route('/user')
  .post(function(test){})
  .get(function(test){})
  .put(function(test){});
    
// expressListRoutes({ prefix: '/api/v1' }, 'API:', router );

var route, routes = [];

app._router.stack.forEach(function(middleware){
    if(middleware.route){ // routes registered directly on the app
        routes.push(middleware.route);
    } else if(middleware.name === 'router'){ // router middleware 
        middleware.handle.stack.forEach(function(handler){
            route = handler.route;
            route && routes.push(route);
        });
    }
});

routes.forEach(function(temp){
	var methods = "";
	for(var method in temp.methods){
		methods += method + ", ";
	}
	console.log(temp.path + ": " + methods);
});

Output:
/user: post, get, put,
/: get,
Expected Output:
/api/v1/user: post, get, put,
/: get,

[dougwilson]

Here is a very, very hacky way for that app. I can't stress how hacky this is, but here it is:

function print (path, layer) {
  if (layer.route) {
    layer.route.stack.forEach(print.bind(null, path.concat(split(layer.route.path))))
  } else if (layer.name === 'router' && layer.handle.stack) {
    layer.handle.stack.forEach(print.bind(null, path.concat(split(layer.regexp))))
  } else if (layer.method) {
    console.log('%s /%s',
      layer.method.toUpperCase(),
      path.concat(split(layer.regexp)).filter(Boolean).join('/'))
  }
}

function split (thing) {
  if (typeof thing === 'string') {
    return thing.split('/')
  } else if (thing.fast_slash) {
    return ''
  } else {
    var match = thing.toString()
      .replace('\\/?', '')
      .replace('(?=\\/|$)', '$')
      .match(/^\/\^((?:\\[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\\/]|[^.*+?^${}()|[\]\\\/])*)\$\//)
    return match
      ? match[1].replace(/\\(.)/g, '$1').split('/')
      : '<complex:' + thing.toString() + '>'
  }
}

app._router.stack.forEach(print.bind(null, []))

That produces:

POST /api/v1/user
GET /api/v1/user
PUT /api/v1/user
GET /

[bryanCoteChang]

Hey, I'll take hacky over nothing any day . :)

I'll have to try this against our other apps and get back to you! Thanks for looking into this so quickly!!

[bryanCoteChang]

It's been working perfectly for our simpler projects, pretty confident it'll work for our more convoluted apps as well, but I will keep you posted. :)

I wanted to check in with you before I did it, but there's this stackoverflow post of others who have tried to get this working, would it be ok if I posted your hacky albeit effective solution?

[urbinopescada]

It's the only I found that realy works so far ... good job

[knnth]

Thanks, @dougwilson! This is the only solution working. I hope the next version do not break this code :D

[daniele-orlando]

Same topic discussed and addressed on StackOveflow.

[mathieutu]

I've found this package, which seems to work properly: https://github.com/AlbertoFdzM/express-list-endpoints !

[ErisDS]

I wrote a package to list middleware and routes mounted on an app quite a while ago: https://github.com/ErisDS/middleware-stack-printer

Maybe its useful for someone else.

[surendra-y]

Why don't you try something like swagger using tsoa(it automatically generates a swagger.json file) which will have all the api liat including what parameters it takes.
You can also hoat the same using swagge-ui-express locally. That will act as a better documents and will always auto update if you set up your run scripts correctly.

Just one note, tsoa requires Typescript.

[StuAtGit]

@surendra-y - the problem I've had with swagger & friends (and tsoa looks similar) is that they all depend on some sort of non-authoritative, duplicate source of route information: annotations, jsdoc, etc. Which only works long term if you're disciplined enough where you probably don't need it in the first place. The great thing about doing it via reflection is:

• it's trivial to maintain
• it's actually helped me find really dumb copy & paste bugs (like a route/resource was set up by copying another route wiring, and then changing the method... but not the route/resource), because it's generated from a truly authoritative source of truth. We'll not talk about who wrote the really dumb bug (me) ;)

That said, if whatever middleware does this also spits out the result in OpenAPI format - even better!

[dondre]

Here's how I parsed out the express routes to a json array.

const endpoints = app._router.stack.filter(x=> x.route && x.route.path && Object.keys(x.route.methods) != 0).map(layer => ({ method :layer.route.stack[0].method.toUpperCase(), path: layer.route.path}));

Result
[{ method: "GET", path: "/api/example }, {...}]

[wesleytodd]

@StuAtGit, maybe this will help you?

https://github.com/wesleytodd/express-openapi/

[StuAtGit]

@wesleytodd - 👍
That's a very clever solution. The kind of thing that seems obvious once you see, but as seen in this thread, not until then ;)

[NaveenDA]

I use this package, which gives both terminal and web view
https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-routes-catalogue

[Uzlopak]

@dougwilson

Seems like that there are also some parasites on the internet, who steal your idea and sell them as their own...

https://medium.com/@stupid_arnob/get-all-api-path-with-method-in-a-single-api-request-f6116254ea1a

[TLouage]

Hi if someone is still searching, I rewrote the solution of @dougwilson in Typescript and made it output an array of strings of your routes so you can do with them what you wish.

function getRoutesOfLayer(path: string, layer: any): string[] {
    if (layer.method) {
        return [layer.method.toUpperCase() + ' ' + path];
    }
    else if (layer.route) {
        return getRoutesOfLayer(path + split(layer.route.path), layer.route.stack[0]);
    }
    else if (layer.name === 'router' && layer.handle.stack) {
        let routes: string[] = [];

        layer.handle.stack.forEach(function(stackItem: any) {
            routes = routes.concat(getRoutesOfLayer(path + split(layer.regexp), stackItem));
        });

        return routes;
    }

    return [];
}

function split (thing: any): string {
    if (typeof thing === 'string') {
        return thing;
    } else if (thing.fast_slash) {
        return '';
    } else {
        var match = thing.toString()
        .replace('\\/?', '')
        .replace('(?=\\/|$)', '$')
        .match(/^\/\^((?:\\[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\\/]|[^.*+?^${}()|[\]\\\/])*)\$\//)
        return match
        ? match[1].replace(/\\(.)/g, '$1')
        : '<complex:' + thing.toString() + '>';
    }
}

And then you can call it like this:

function getRoutes(app: Application): string[] {
    let routes: string[] = [];

    app._router.stack.forEach(function(layer: any) {
        routes = routes.concat(getRoutesOfLayer('', layer));
    });

    return routes;
}

[ghinks]

We are always listening 😀

[Uzlopak]

Actually I wrote it as an middleware and in a singleton pattern. This is useful if you dont add routes on runtime, every route has only one Routehandler. So you can save the routes into a Map one time and can have a fast lookup. I used it to match the routes to the RouteHandlers and now I can lookup what route a routehandler has.

[nklisch]

I wrote up a dependency free Typescript npm package that parses complex express apps and outputs a list of data per route and allows attaching meta-data to each route, if desired.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-route-parser
It also handles the cases that wesley todd's open api npm package runs into on some project configurations.

[brunolnetto]

@nklisch I appreciate your library very much. However, I am afraid it does not dig up to the middleware level. Take, for example, my app available here: I use three libraries, swagger-stats, express-status-monitor and swagger-jsdoc, which inject some route, respectively /swagger-stats/stats, /status and explicitly-defined /swagger route. However, it is not able to find them for a reason unknown.

Could you please take a look at this abnormal behaviour?

[nklisch]

@brunolnetto I'll take a look

[nklisch]

@brunolnetto
For swagger ui try:
router.use('/swagger"', swaggerUi.serve);
router.get('/swagger", swaggerUi.setup(swaggerDocument));
instead of just one app.use() line.

But for swagger-stats, I looked into how they do their routing, and unfortunately they have a custom solution that doesn't use Expresses built-in route matching, seen here:
https://github.com/slanatech/swagger-stats/blob/master/lib/swsInterface.js#L141-L149

This means it is impossible for someone to scan the Express stack to figure out these routes, as they are hidden inside custom logic, inside a middleware.

[m-graf]

Hey y'all – to my understanding NestJS uses express for routing – how can I grab the @Version decorator when getting routes? FWIW I'm using URI based versioning, so the routes look something like:

/foo/1.0/bar/baz however, when querering the router (using this is an example #3308 (comment)) – I see: /bar/baz (which is missing both the versioning prefix (foo) and the version number 1.0. Any help would be greatly appreciated...

[olawalejuwonm]

Is there anyone that renders it as an HTML file?

[ex1st]

Hi @wesleytodd and @blakeembrey!
After upgrade to stable v5 i can't find layer.regexp anymore. Does anyone have any ideas on how to build a complete tree of subrouts now? Thank you!

[thernstig]

It would be great if this can be added as an official function instead for users to have to copy&paste this. And it could contain tests.

[IamLizu]

Hey @ex1st 👋

I would love if you could create a new question in discussion for specifically version 5. Perhaps it will help people easily find the updated version and let's keep the talk here for version 4.

[ex1st]

Hi @IamLizu, done! Can you add the labels v5 and question to #5961? Thank you!

[thernstig]

@ex1st I think it would be fair to actually create an issue for this to be added as an official feature as well. Linking to this thread (adn the new one) would show there is plenty of people who want this.

This is especially important in some very common, modern scenarios when using e.g. Prometheus. Best practices tells one should initiate all counters to 0 for all combinations of routes (verb and http response as labels). The only way to do this without manual effort is to use a function such as this presented in this thread.