Grassroots

A NodeJS/Coffeescript Microframework

Overview

Grassroots is an ExpressJS extension framework written in Coffeescript that automatically attaches RESTful Resource callbacks to conventional routes based on file structure and naming conventions. Like SynthJS, by which is it heavily inspired, it aims to remove some of the tedium and repetition involved in setting up CRUD APIs.

Setup

(1) Clone grassroots into your node_modules directory

hg clone <https://[e-mail]/jwherring/grassroots>

(2) Run npm install from with this directory to get all of the dependencies

cd grassroots

npm install

(3) Compile using grunt

grunt coffee

(4) Include in the main file of your application:: : var grassroots = require('grassroots');

(5) Any middleware that should be loaded prior to the routes should be passed on the config object in an array called middleware. Grassroots will attach these to the application in the order they're listed.

(6) Call init on the grassroots object and pass in an optional config object. Grassroots will return the express application:: : app = grassroots.init(config);

(7) As an alternative, grassroots.mount(config) is available. This loads only the routers. The application should be instantiated before passing through to mount.

Usage

By default, grassroots looks for a routes/ directory in the same directory as your application entrypoint. Each file found in this directory will become a RESTful resource with routes attached for each method exposed in the file.

Methods should be named according to the associated HTTP VERB (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) in all lower-case. All routes assume, by default, an :id param.

So, for example, a file named one.coffee with the following contents:

exports.get = (req, res) ->
  code

exports.post = (req, res) ->
  code

would result in the creation of the following routes:

(GET) /one/id/:id

(POST) /one

Some extensions are special. For example, adding Index to a get route will create an endpoint that returns the entire list of entities.

So, augmenting the previous example like so:

exports.getIndex = (req, res) ->
  code

exports.get = (req, res) ->
  code

exports.post = (req, res) ->
  code

would result in the creation of the following routes:

(GET) /one

(GET) /one/id/:id

(POST) /one

Additional Parameters

Additional request parameters can be passed in in the normal way - either in the request body or the url query string. Additionally, grassroots will split the request url into key-value pairs and attach it to the req object as urlparams, throwing away the entity name and id parameter. For example, the following path:

/{entityname}/id/{id}/this/is/a/path

would result in the following object:

{
  'this': 'is',
  'a': 'path'
}

which could be accessed in the normal way:

req.urlparams.a === 'path' // true

At present, if splitting the request path results in an odd number of elements, the last one is simply ignored.

If this behavior is not desired, it is possible to customize it by passing in a custom url path parser function on the options object as options.keyvalparser. This function should take a single argument representing the request path (grassroots will pass req.path to this function).

Database

By default, grassroots will try to establish a connection to a bucket named grassroots on a couchbase backend. This is configurable though the options.database object, however:

options = 
  'database': 
    'bucket': 'my_bucket'
    'backend': 'couchbase'

app = grassroots.init options

At present, only couchbase is supported, and it is the responsibility of the installer to make sure that the couchbase SDK is installed.

Schemas

grassroots provides a validateentity() method on req if a schema is provided. Schemas, by convention, are specified in the projects /schemas directory in files named after the entity they validate - just as with route files. The file should have a .coffee extension, and should consist of a single exported object called schema which specifies the schema to validate against. Schemas are checked using the tv4 library, and should therefore be specified according to the JSON Schema draft v4.

The name of the /schemas directory can be changed by passing in a relative path as the schemadir member of the config object passed in to init().

req.validateentity(entity) takes an optional parameter entity which is the object to validate. If not provided, it will use req.body. Please note that validateentity is only attached for POST and PUT requests.

Additionally, it is possible to provide a defaults schema in the schema file. This should be an object of key-value pairs that will be substituted in for missing values on POST requests. For example:

exports.defaults =
  "one": "default for one"

If included in one.schema, any POST request to /one that lacks a one member will have it set to "default for one". Since validation happens after defaults have been applied, the defaults must comply with the general schema.

Static Assets

Behind the scenes, grassroots uses HarpJS to precompile all your static assets. Check out the harpjs homepage for more details, but harp recognizes files with various extensions and compiles them appropriately. grassroots will automatically mount static/js and static/css as asset directories (creating them if they do not exist) if none are specified on the options object. To set your own paths, simply include entries for jsdir and cssdir in the options object passed to grassroots.init(). For example:

options = {jsdir: 'public/js', cssdir: 'public/css'}
app = grassroots.init(options)

By default, css and js files are served from /css and /js. To change this, you can pass in jsroute and cssroute params to options (include the preceding slash):

options = {jsroute: '/javascript', cssroute: '/styles'}
app = grassroots.init(options)

Middleware

grassroots sets up some standard Connect middleware, including the body-parser and the cookie-parser. To pass in a signature secret and other options to the cookie-parser, include members named cookiesignature and cookieoptions on the options object passed to grassroots.