The single most important middleware for Express

Almost every web framework I have used in the past five years shares the same stupid flaw: mishandling of redundant slashes. Invariably this causes problems when some script somewhere joins URL segments together with multiple slashes in them, and ends up receiving a 404.

The following ExpressJS middleware will properly neutralize redundant slashes before the routing layer takes over.

  /*
   * Remove redundant slashes in the URL for properly routing
   *
   * For example: //authentication -> /authentication which ensures that the
   * request is routed correctly
   */
  app.all('*', (request, response, next) => {
    request.url = request.url.replace(/\/+/, '/');
    next();
  });