Framework Documentation - Router Package

Overview

The Router package is used to register an application's routes and to route the request URI to a controller method.

Adding maps

The purpose of a router is to find a controller based on a routing path. The path could be a URL for a web site, or it could be an
end-point for a RESTful web-services API.

The addRoute method is used to map at routing pattern to a controller.

use Joomla\Router\Router;

$router = new Router;
$router
    ->addRoute('GET', '/article/:article_id', 'Acme\\ArticleController') // Route to Controller
	->addRoute('GET', '/component/*', function() { return true; }) // Route to Closure
	->addRoute('GET', '/user/:id', 'get_user'); // Route to function / callable

function get_user($id)
{
    // do stuff
}

By default, named variables in the defined route have a matching regex of ([^/]*), which matches everything in a route, up to the next /.
You can optionally define the exact regex to use, by passing a third parameter to the addMaps function. This is an associative array using
the named variables as the keys and the desired regex as the values.

use Joomla\Router\Router;

$router = new Router;
$router->addRoute(
    'GET',
    '/user/:id',
    'UserController@show',
    array(
        'id' => '(\d+)'
    )
);

If you were to take the above code, and match it against a path of /user/123, you would receive the following array back.

$match = $router->parseRoute('/user/123');

print_r($match);
// Array
// (
//     [controller] => UserController@show
//     [vars] => Array
//         (
//             [name] => user
//         )
// )

At this point, you can do whatever you want with the returned data. It's up to you to instantiate your controller, or just use
call_user_func_array($matched['controller'], $matched['vars']) in your FrontController if you're using the Router as the backbone
for a micro framework. It's completely flexible.