Handling custom URLs

By default, SQLPage serves the file that matches the URL requested by the client. If your users enter https://example.com/about, SQLPage will serve the file about/index.sql in your project. If you create a file named about.sql, SQLPage will serve it when the user requests https://example.com/about.sql.

But what if you want to handle URLs that don't match any file in your project ? For example, what if you have a blog, and you want nice urls like example.com/blog/my-trip-to-rome, but you don't want to create a file for each blog post ? By default, SQLPage would return a sad 404 error if you don't have a file named blog/my-trip-to-rome/index.sql in your project's root directory.

But you can customize this behavior by creating a file named 404.sql in your project.

The 404.sql file

When SQLPage doesn't find a file that matches the URL requested by the client, it will serve the file 404.sql if it exists.

Since v0.28, when SQLPage receives a request for a URL like https://example.com/a/b/c, it will look for the file a/b/c/index.sql in your project, and if it doesn't find it, it will then search for, in order:

• /a/b/404.sql
• /a/404.sql
• /404.sql

Basic routing example

So, you have a blog_posts table in your database, with columns name, and content. You want to serve the content of the blog post with id :id when the user requests example.com/blog/:id. You can do this by creating a 404.sql file in the blog directory of your project:

-- blog/404.sql

-- Get the id from the URL
set name = substr(sqlpage.path(), 1+length('/blog/'));

-- Get the blog post from the database
select 'text' as component,
    content as contents_md
from blog_posts
where name = $name;

Now, when a user requests example.com/blog/my-trip-to-rome, SQLPage will serve the content of the blog post with name my-trip-to-rome from the blog_posts table.