# Add a public route

A route can be registered as either public or protected. This visibility indicator does not determine whether a route is accessible to everyone or restricted to authenticated users; that protection is typically enforced by an authentication boundary.

In a Squide application, the visibility indicator determines whether routes will be rendered as children of either the PublicRoutes or ProtectedRoutes placeholders and whether the usePublicDataQueries or useProtectedDataQueries hooks should execute their requests. If the initially requested route is marked as protected and both hooks are defined, each query hook will execute its respective requests. However, if the route is marked as public, only the usePublicDataQueries hook will execute its requests.

When a route is registered with the registerRoute function, it is considered protected by default. Therefore, if a route does not rely on the application's global protected data, it should be explicitly registered as public using the registerPublicRoute function:

import type { ModuleRegisterFunction, FireflyRuntime } from "@squide/firefly";
import { Page } from "./Page.tsx";

export const register: ModuleRegisterFunction<FireflyRuntime> = runtime => {
    runtime.registerPublicRoute({
        path: "/page",
        element: <Page />
    });
}

Don't forget to register the PublicRoutes placeholder in the host application:

import { PublicRoutes, ProtectedRoutes, type ModuleRegisterFunction, type FireflyRuntime } from "@squide/firefly";
import { RootLayout } from "./RootLayout.tsx";

export const registerHost: ModuleRegisterFunction<FireflyRuntime> = runtime => {
    runtime.registerRoute({
        element: <RootLayout />,
        children: [
            // Placeholders indicating where non hoisted or nested public and protected routes will be rendered.
            PublicRoutes,
            ProtectedRoutes
        ]
    }, {
        hoist: true
    });
};