MVC and routing in Magento

When you look at a URL for any Magento page, you might see a URL like https://magento.test/customer/account/create.

Magento follows a Model-View-Controller design pattern, also known as MVC. The Controller part of that pattern in Magento follows a very structured format, as each of the parts of the URL help decide where to route requests.

These three main parts of the URL make up the frontName, controllerName and actionName, and form the core of Magento’s URL routing pattern.

Let’s understand how this works by creating our own frontName, controllerName, actionName combo.

Create a route

The frontName is the start of the request, and relates back to a specific module. Route files are defined with XML, but we also must specify the area of the route. Magento has two main areas: frontend and adminhtml. The frontend deals with the frontend instance of Magento, and adminhtml deals with anything admin-related. Since we want to respond to requests on the frontend of our Magento instance, we’ll create a folder within the etc directory named frontend.

Then, let’s create a new file in the frontend directory named routes.xml. This will again follow a specific format for the root config node. Within it, we will define a router and related route. Route accepts two attributes, id and frontName. We’ll set both of these to jumpstart, since we want to listen to requests at /jumpstart.

Then we’ll let Magento know which module is responsible for this route by creating a module node within it, with the name set equal to our module in that string format, Macademy_Jumpstart:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config xmlns:xsi="<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance>" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:App/etc/routes.xsd">
    <router id="standard">
        <route id="jumpstart" frontName="jumpstart">
            <module name="Macademy_Jumpstart"/>
        </route>
    </router>
</config>

Now that we have a route set up, we can set up our controller to respond to it.