🏗 Designing Public & Admin Routes Properly in Express (Node.js + TypeScript)

When building a scalable backend API, one common question is: Should we separate admin routes like /api/admin/categories Or protect routes using middleware? In this article, I’ll show you the clean and scalable way to structure public and admin routes. 🚀 The Use Case We are building a Blog System with categories. We need: Public users → View all categories Admin users → Create categories ❌ Bad Practice (URL-Based Role Separation) POST /api/admin/categories GET /api/categories Why this is not ideal? URL becomes tightly coupled with roles Harder to scale Not RESTful Role logic leaks into routing ✅ Recommended Approach (Middleware-Based Authorization) Keep URLs clean and RESTful. GET /api/categories → Public POST /api/categories → Admin only Access control should be handled by middleware, not the URL. 📂 Project Structure (Feature-Based Architecture) src/ ├── modules/ │ ├── categories/ │ │ ├── categories.controller.ts │ │ ├── categories.service.ts │ │ ├── categories.routes.ts │ │ ├── categ