create-files-and-directories-for-dynamic-routes.md

Create Files And Directories For Dynamic Routes

Next.js allows you to go beyond static, predefined pages and routes with dynamic routing.

The common example is a posts route that includes a slug to dynmically reference a particular post. The template for that page can be defined at pages/posts/[slug].js. Notice the square brackets around the slug, that tells Next that it is a dynamic route and whatever matches against the slug should be included in router.query as slug.

Let's try to create that file:

$ touch pages/posts/[slug].js
zsh: no matches found: pages/posts/[slug].js

That failed. To create this kind of file from the command-line, you are going to need to escape the square brackets:

$ touch pages/posts/\[slug\].js

You can do the same if you use dynamic routing in your directory structure:

$ mkdir -p pages/posts/\[year\]/\[month\]/\[day\]

And now we have the following structure:

$ exa --tree pages/posts
pages/posts
├── [slug].js
└── [year]
   └── [month]
      └── [day]