# File-Based Routing

FolderWeb's routing is beautifully simple: **your folder structure is your URL structure**. No configuration files, no route definitions, no magic strings.

## How It Works

When you visit a URL, FolderWeb looks for matching folders and files:

```
/content/
├── index.md              → /
├── about/
│   └── index.md          → /about/
└── blog/
    ├── 2024-11-01-post/
    │   └── index.md      → /blog/post/
    └── index.md          → /blog/
```

## Automatic Features

**Folder names become URLs** – Create a folder called `projects` and it's instantly available at `/projects/`

**Date prefixes are stripped** – `2024-11-01-my-post` becomes `/my-post/` in the URL

**Custom slugs via metadata** – Override the default URL with `slug = "custom-url"` in `metadata.ini`

**Trailing slashes** – Directories always redirect to include trailing slashes for consistency

## Example

This very page demonstrates file-based routing! The path is:

```
app/default/content/examples/file-based-routing/index.md
```

Which renders at:

```
/examples/file-based-routing/
```

No routes to define. No configuration to update. Just files and folders.

## Benefits

- **Intuitive** – If you can navigate folders, you understand the routing
- **Refactor-friendly** – Moving content means moving folders
- **No broken links** – URLs match the filesystem
- **Fast** – No route matching overhead, direct file lookup
- **Predictable** – What you see is what you get