Route Action Gen

Route Action Gen is a code generation CLI that produces type-safe route handlers, React hooks, server functions, form actions, and form components from declarative config files.

It supports:

• Next.js Route Handlers (App Router)
• Next.js API Routes (Pages Router)
• React Server Functions
• React Form Actions

Installation

npm install route-action-gen

pnpm add route-action-gen

yarn add route-action-gen

bun add route-action-gen

Why use this tool?

There are many ways to get and update data in a server. You can use route handlers, server functions, or form actions. But they all share the same boilerplate: parsing the request, validating input, handling errors, and returning typed responses.

Route Action Gen lets you focus on the main logic. You declare validators and a handler in a config file, then the CLI generates all the boilerplate for you. Every endpoint will be:

• Strongly typed -- both request and response are fully typed end to end, from the route handler down to the React hook in your client component.
• Consistent -- every endpoint follows the same structure and naming convention.
• Easily parsable -- you can quickly identify the behavior of any endpoint by looking at its config: what data it expects in the body, params, headers, or search params, and what the response looks like.

How it works

1. You create a route.[method].config.ts file in the directory where the route lives.
2. You define a requestValidator, a responseValidator, and a handler function in that config file.
3. You run npx route-action-gen and the CLI scans for all config files, then generates code in a .generated/ directory.
4. An entry point file (route.ts for App Router, index.ts for Pages Router) is created automatically if it does not exist. It re-exports from .generated/.

For App Router, generated files live in .generated/ inside the config directory (e.g. app/api/posts/.generated/). For Pages Router, generated files are placed at the project root under .generated/ in a mirror of the config path (e.g. .generated/pages/api/users/). This keeps them outside of pages/ so Next.js does not treat them as API routes.

The CLI supports both Next.js App Router and Pages Router. By default it uses auto detection: if the config file is inside a pages/ directory it generates Pages Router code, otherwise it generates App Router code.

Read the Quick Start guide to get going, or jump to the Config File reference for the full spec.