json-mocks

Mock API Service

Get a full fake REST API with zero coding in less than 10 seconds.

Being a part of front-end and back-end development teams, many times the back-end/third party APIs are just not ready for integration and testing. To get around that, you can simply dump the mock JSON responses here with the required endpoint to get API endpoints up and running.

Usage

WARNING: An earlier version of the package was using ':' as a separator. Since ':' is not a valid filename character in windows, we had to migrate to a more generic separator which is ' '(space).
We do provide backward compatibility, so even if you are using ':' as a separator, you have nothing to worry about.

• Create a JSON file with the name of the endpoint in mocks folder. Place the mock response content in the file. Example creating a file with the name hello.json with the content.

  {
      "message": "Hello World"
  }
  

  will create an endpoint /hello and return the content in API response.

• You can also create nested sub-directories inside mocks to generate a nested route.

• Naming Convention for the files inside mocks folder: <HTTP-METHOD><SPACE><ENDPOINT_NAME>.json
  By default, the HTTP method is assumed to be GET.

  Http Method	Endpoint	Filename
  HTTP-METHOD	/endpoint	method-in-lower-case endpoint.json
  GET	/ping	get ping.json or ping.json
  POST	/user	post user.json
  PUT	/user	put user.json
  DELETE	/user	delete user.json

  Example:

  A directory structure like this generates the following routes

  mocks
  ├── ping.json
  ├── students
  │   └── teams
  │       ├── alpha.json
  │       ├── beta.json
  │       └── post teams.json
  └── users
      ├── new.json
      └── old.json
  

  List of all generated routes

  Adding route:  GET /ping
  Adding route:  GET /students/teams/alpha
  Adding route:  GET /students/teams/beta
  Adding route:  POST /students/teams/teams
  Adding route:  GET /users/new
  Adding route:  GET /users/old
  

• Run npx json-mocks to start the server.

WARNING:
- Ensure to run the command npx json-mocks at the same level where the mocks folder is created.
DO NOT RUN IT INSIDE THE mocks FOLDER.
- The filenames should be in urlencoded format else the endpoints won't accesible. This essentially means to create an endpoint /data list the filename should be /data%20list.

ENV Variables

• PORT: Port at which the node server will run. If not specified the server will run at port 8080.
• SERVICE_NAME: Service prefix of path at which the files will be exposed. Default value is empty string.

  Usecase

  If you want to generate the following routes

  GET /user-service/students/teams/alpha
  GET /user-service/students/teams/beta
  POST /user-service/students/teams/teams
  GET /user-service/users/new
  GET /user-service/users/old
  

  i.e. prefix user-service to all the end points. Then you can set the value of SERVICE_NAME variable to user-service and have the following folder structure:

  mocks
  ├── students
  │   └── teams
  │       ├── alpha.json
  │       ├── beta.json
  │       └── post teams.json
  └── users
      ├── new.json
      └── old.json
  

Development

• Clone the repo.
  Place the mock response JSONs with appropriate filenames inside the mocks folder and start the server. You should be good to go.

  You can run the node server locally or use docker.

  • Docker

    1. Run docker build . -t mock-api to build the docker image.
    2. Run docker run -p 8080:8080 -d mock-api to run the container at 8080 port.

  • Locally

    1. Run npm install.
    2. Run npm start to start the server at 8080 or the specified port in env variables. Hit the /ping route to check the health of the server.
• Check server logs to get list of all the generated endpoints and any incoming requests. We use morgan to log all the incoming requests.

  Sample logs

  Adding route:  GET /user-service/ping  
  Adding route:  GET /user-service/students/teams/alpha  
  Adding route:  GET /user-service/students/teams/beta  
  Adding route:  POST /user-service/students/teams/teams  
  Adding route:  GET /user-service/users/new  
  Adding route:  GET /user-service/users/old  
  Server is running on PORT 8080  
  ::1 - GET /user-service/ping HTTP/1.1 200 18 - 4.575 ms  
  ::1 - GET /user-service/users/old HTTP/1.1 200 62 - 1.624 ms