Restify.js
is an express addon that can be used to design api much faster and elegantly. Currently the library provides minimalistic functions but they can be extended and customized.
The library can be installed from npm
itself.
A sample configuration for api is
{
"__meta__":{
"database": "restify",
"namespace": "v1",
"auth" : {
"enableAuth": true,
"routeHandle" : "auth",
"userModel" : "restify.js/models/user.js",
"authStrategy" : "restify.js/auth/tokenAuth.js",
"privateKey": "Private key path comes here"
}
},
"models":{
"emailDetails": "./models/email.js"
},
"views" :{
"/users": {
"model" : "emailDetails",
"mixin" : ["./mixins/helloMixin.js"]
}
}
}
Note this is a json
file defined inside your project. restify.js
depends on mongodb
as its database. The name for database can be initialized in the __meta__
section of the json. Models are the same as that from mongoosejs
and a sample model is given below
var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;
var User = new Schema({
name : {type: String, required: false},
email : {type: String, required: true}
});
module.exports = mongoose.model('user', User);
which takes in name
and email
parameters.
The code below is a simple example that takes in the configuration from above and adds it to the express app as routes. As you can see restify.js
handles most of the parts within the framework and is hackable at the same time from json configuration above.
express = require 'express'
restify = require 'restify.js'
parser = require 'body-parser'
chalk = require 'chalk'
app = express()
app.use parser.urlencoded({ extended: false })
# Create new api instance
apiInstance = new restify
# Load json configuration
apiInstance.loadJson './config.json'
# Onload callback where you can add views
apiInstance.onload (status,context)->
app.use '/',context.as_view()
app.listen 3000,()->
console.log chalk.red 'App listening on port 3000!'
As it was scheduled, from v0.0.2 restify.js
provides internal mechanism for authentication and user management. This being said the system can be modified at will from the json configuration file. In the json configuration file consider this part of snippet
"auth" : {
"enableAuth": true,
"routeHandle" : "auth",
"userModel" : "restify.js/models/user.js",
"authStrategy" : "restify.js/auth/tokenAuth.js",
"privateKey": "Private key path comes here"
}
This example takes token strategy for authentication provided inside resify.js
. needless to say the User model
and strategy
can be changed at will.
- enableAuth is a boolean value that will actually determine whether authentication is required in the app
- routeHandle is url prefix for authentication. In this case authentication is accessible at '/auth'
-
userModel this is the user model provided by default inside
restify.js
. You can always use custom model here -
authStrategy Strategy is a set of views and utils that are used for authentication.
restify.js
by default comes with stratgy for token authentication usingJSON web tokens
. You can change this to use a custom strategy -
privateKey Security of a system is very important therefore rather than using secret key for generating tokens,
restify.js
directly takersa
private key to generate the tokens.
The following endpoints provide more extensive use for the token strategy. The url is being generated from the json configuration mentioned above.
-
POST
/auth
This is the login route and requiresusername
andpassword
to authenticate. -
POST
/auth/logout
The logout route and needstoken
as post parameter. -
POST
/auth/signup
Create new user by user model as defined in json configuration
Strategy also comes with utils
functions that are helpers and can be used in other routes in express
-
is_authenticated
This takes intoken
and returnsboolean
-
is_superuser
This takes intoken
and returnsboolean
Token strategy is still under development and pull requests are appreciated
A lot of api calls are always CRUD
in nature and mixins solve this problem. You can create your own mixins and also if you are creating a generic mixin and want to share that send a pull request on github. A sample mixin code is as given below
module.exports = (route,model,router)->
router.get route,(req,res,next)->
model.find {},(err,result)->
if(err)
console.error err
res.send result
restify.js
will automatically pass the model as defined in configuration. In this example of mixin it is returning all the data in a simple get request.
Here are the list of features implemented and in the process of being implemented. If you have some suggestions you can always make a pull request in github repo.
- [x] Implement mixin framework
- [x] Implement model framework
- [x] Implement authentication as a part of framework
- [ ] Add default mixins inside the library
- [ ] HTML based api browser like
postman
- [ ] Add YAML support compatible with swagger.io
- [ ] Request throttling