Separate Routing Files

Now that we have a working router and 404 handling, let's clean up our code a bit and take the routing logic out of the public/index.php file.

We will have one file for our routes and one for the router. Ultimately, the router will be a class with methods. We will do that soon.

Create a file called routes.php in the root directory. This will be where we define our routes. Instead of putting the array in a variable, we will just return it.

return [
  '/' => 'controllers/home.php',
  '/listings' => 'controllers/listings/index.php',
  '/listings/create' => 'controllers/listings/create.php',
  '404' => 'controllers/error/404.php'
];

Now, create a file called router.php in the root directory. This will be where we define our router. We will use the routes.php file to get the routes.

$routes = require('routes.php');

if (array_key_exists($uri, $routes)) {
  require $routes[$uri];
} else {
  require $routes['404'];
}

Now your public/index.php file should look like this:

require '../helpers.php';

$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

require basePath('router.php');

Send a 404 Status Code

Right now we are just sending the 404 page, but we are not sending the 404 status code. HTTP has specific codes for different types of responses. a 200 response means everything it ok and that is what we are sending now. If you go to a page that does not exist and you open your devtools and look at the Network tab, you will see 200 OK:

We can send a 404 status code by using the http_response_code() function.

In your router.php file, add this line before the require $routes['404']; line:

http_response_code(404);

Now when you go to a page that does not exist, you will see 404 Not Found in the Network tab:

In the next lesson, we will add a bit more functionality to our router and then we'll get into the database stuff.