Expressive router for nodejs and the browser. Rill brings cascading middleware to the browser and enables a familiar routing solution for web applications.

Rill provides the minimum for abstractions over nodejs and the browser enabling things like routing (with redirecting, refreshes and more), cookies, and middleware with the same api.

It supports many view engines including Marko, React, Svelte and even html only template engines such as Pug.

Installation

npm install rill

Browser support

All modern browsers are supported including IE10 and above. Older browsers will need to polyfill the Promise API, checkout es6-promise for a good polyfill, babel-polyfill also covers this.

Community

Articles

Why Rill?

Rill is the answer to a simple question; Can I run my Express style router in the browser? Turns out you can and it works awesome.

It brings a common interface to many typical app like features in both the browser and nodejs. Many isomorphic frameworks and routers have crazy abstractions and learning curves but with Rill, if you understand Express or Koa, you already know how the routing works! In Rill you get to program much of your application logic using the same api (client or server) including routing, rendering, data fetching and more are easily shared.

Rill also works perfectly as a stand alone router for nodejs or in the browser. This allows for easy progressive enhancement. If all is well the browser can handle much of your application logic and if JavaScript fails for any reason your server knows exactly what to do.

How does this thing work?

If you look at the source for Rill here you will quickly notice there is ZERO browser specific code. This is all thanks to @rill/http which is node's HTTP.createServer ported to the browser.

In the browser it works by listening for internal link clicks, form submissions and browser history changes. It will then create a Rill Context for each of these events and emit it through the router, similar to how receiving a request works in nodejs.

It supports everything you'd expect from a client side nodejs server. This includes redirects, refreshes, cookies, scrolling and url updates using the History API.

Example

Create an app

/**
 * The following code can run 100% in the browser or in nodejs.
 * Examples use es2015/2016 with Babel and JSX but this is optional.
 */

import Rill from 'rill'
const app = new Rill() // You can call Rill without new, but autocomplete will not work.

Setup middleware

// Universal form data parsing middleware.
import bodyParser from '@rill/body'
app.use(bodyParser())

// Universal react rendering middleware.
import reactRenderer from '@rill/react'
app.use(reactRenderer())

// Example Logger
app.use(async ({ req }, next)=> {
  const start = Date.now()

  // Rill uses promises for control flow.
  // ES2016 async functions work great as well!
  await next()

  const ms = Date.now() - start
  console.log(`${req.method} ${req.url} - ${ms}`)
})

Setup a page

// Respond to a GET request.
app.get('/todos', async ({ res })=> {
  // Fetch a todolist from some service.
  const todolist = await MyTodoListService.getAllTodos()

  // Directly set React virtual dom to the body thanks to @rill/react.
  // (Checkout @rill/html for universal html diffing).
  res.body = (
    <html>
      <head>
        <title>My App</title>
        <meta name="description" content="Rill Application">
      </head>
      <body>
        <form action="/add-todo" method="POST">
          <h1>Just a plain old form</h1>
          <input type="text" name="todo"/>
          <button type="submit">Add Todo</button>
        </form>

        {todolist.length
          ? todolist.map(renderTodo)
          : 'No todos to display.'
        }
        <script src="/app.js"/>
      </body>
    </html>
  )
})

Handle a form submission

// Respond to a POST request.
app.post('/add-todo', async ({ req, res })=> {
  // We handle form submissions with Rill the same way one would express or koa.
  // Here we are simply adding the todo via some service.
  await MyTodoListService.addTodo({ text: req.body.todo })
  // And then we redirect back (same as res.redirect('/todos'))
  res.redirect('back')
})

Start app

// Start a regular http server.
// In the browser any form submissions or link clicks will intercepted by @rill/http.
app.listen({ port: 80 })

Prior Art

koa-client - Koa clone that runs in the browser, inspired this package.
monorouter - Another isomorphic router that partially inspired this package.

Contributions

Use npm test to build and run tests.

License

MIT