This release makes error handling inside middleware a lot more straightforward. It also adds support for automatic response serialization for asynchronous NIO errors.

The vast majority of operations performed in a server-side app are asynchronous: database connections, file reads, network requests, etc. As such the middleware API introduced so far was categorically flawed. This releases fixes that by introducing EventLoopFuture based middleware that can ensure good interop with other existing Swift server-side software.

This release makes working with custom middleware a little less error-prone. Thanks to @jnutting for the feedback and pitch.

Prior to this, it was left to the developer to remember to either call next() or finalize the response. This release adds a requirement for middleware to return a result, which will put the compiler to work and help avoid human-error.

Now you can use the staticFileHandler in your app to serve static files.

app.use(staticFileHandler())

By default, it will look for files in the /Public folder relative to the working directory. In Xcode, this has to be set up in the scheme manually.

To override the static file directory:

app.use(staticFileHandler("/Static"))