[Bottle][bottle] provides the [`@route` decorator][route] to associate URL paths with view functions. This is very convenient, but if you are a [Django][django]-reject like me then you may prefer having all your URLs defined in one place, the advantage being it is easy to see at a glance [all the different URLs your application will match][urlconf].

*Updated: I have re-written this post and the example to make it simpler following Marcel Hellkamp’s comments (Marcel is the primary author of Bottle). My original example was needlessly complicated.*

It is possible to have [a Django-style urlpatterns stanza][urlpatterns] with a Bottle app. Here’s how it can work:

from bottle import route

# Assuming your *_page view functions are defined above somewhere
urlpatterns = (
# (path, func, name)
(‘/’, home_page, ‘home’),
(‘/about’, about_page, ‘about’),
(‘/contact’, contact_page, ‘contact’),
)

for path, func, name in urlpatterns:
route(path, name=name)(func)

Here we run through a list where each item is a triple of URL path, view function and a name for the route. For each we simply call the `route` method and then invoke it with the function object. Not as flexible as using the decorator on a function (because the `@route` decorator can take additional keyword arguments) but at least you can have all the routes in one place at the end of the module.

Then again if you have so many routes that you need to keep them in a pretty list you probably aren’t writing the simple application that Bottle was intended for.

(This was tested with Bottle’s 0.8 and 0.9-dev branches.)

[bottle]: http://bottle.paws.de/
[route]: http://bottle.paws.de/docs/0.8/api.html#bottle.route
[django]: http://www.djangoproject.com/
[urlconf]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/topics/http/urls/#example
[urlpatterns]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/