cannot GET / express.js routing

Question

I am at the early stages of a simple tasks manager that I want to build with the MEAN Stack. I can figure/resolve a simple routing issue. I don't see any error message in the terminal or console except for the 404 client error.

the root path is ok. I get a response back I use html docs to render the ui for both.

this is how I have set up my server.js

var express = require('express')
var path = require('path')
var bodyParser = require('body-parser')

var index = require('./routes/index');
var tasks = require('./routes/tasks');
var app = express();

const port = '3456'


app.use('/', index)
app.use('api', tasks) <= HERE

//view engine
app.set('views', path.join(__dirname, 'views'))
app.set('view engine', 'ejs')
app.engine('html', require('ejs').renderFile);

//static folder
app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'client')))
app.use(bodyParser.json())
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({extended: false}))



app.listen(port, function() {
    console.log('Starting the server at port'  + port );
})

tasks.js

to render the template at the set route

var express = require('express')
var router = express.Router();
var mongojs = require('mongojs');
var db = mongojs('mongodb://sandy:[email protected]:47304/tasklists_21092017', ['tasks'])

router.get('/tasks', function(req, res, next) {
    res.send('api')
    res.render('tasks.html')
    db.tasks.find(function(err, tasks){
        if (err) {
            res.send('error message ' + err)
        }

        res.json(tasks)
    })
})

module.exports = router;

and, index.js fyi

var express = require('express')
var router = express.Router();

router.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
    res.render('index.html')
})

module.exports = router;

screenshot at the link below of the 404 error in browser after starting server on port 3456

404 error - screenshot

thanks for the help. I am sure it can be a little detail. it is very hard to debug though.

Answer 1

This error occurs because there's no route that handles the endpoint /api. What you can do here is create a middleware that will handle the /api. You can do it in your tasks.js like this:

tasks.js

router.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
   res.send('This is api.')
})

Or if what you want to do is to direct the user from the endpoint /api to /api/tasks then you could do it like this:

router.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
   res.redirect('/api/tasks')
})

Hope this helps.