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Key Responsibilities

  1. Request Matching: Analyzing the incoming HTTP method and URI to find a matching route definition.
  2. Route Discovery: Automatically scanning specified namespaces for controllers and extracting their route definitions.
  3. Path Parameter Extraction: Using regex patterns to identify and capture dynamic parts of the URL (e.g., /user/{id}).
  4. Performance Optimization: Caching the discovered routes to disk to ensure that heavy scanning logic only runs when necessary.

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Core Components

  • Router: The main dispatcher that handles the matching logic and produces a response.
  • Route: A data object representing a single API endpoint, including its URL, HTTP method, and metadata.
  • Rate Limit: A subsystem for protecting endpoints from excessive requests.
  • Cache System: A subsystem responsible for persisting and retrieving route definitions for maximum efficiency. Learn more

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How it Works

  1. The Router is initialized with a ClassLocator and a CacheInterface implementation.
  2. During initialization, the Router uses RouteCacheFactory to ensure the route cache is built and up-to-date.
  3. During dispatch, the Router retrieves a route index from the cache.
  4. The Router iterates through the index, comparing the current request’s URI against the pre-generated regex patterns for each route.
  5. If a match is found, the Router retrieves the full route definition from the cache, identifies the associated controller and request classes.
  6. The Router then populates the request object and executes the middleware stack.
By combining documentation-driven route definitions with automated discovery and caching, Apivalk provides a powerful routing system that requires minimal manual intervention.