Restirator

Restirator turns Mongoose Models automatically into an Express or Restify CRUD REST API.

Kickoff your Express / Restify server by just modeling the data with mongoose and turning that into a REST API that you can use from your frontend.

Usage

First install the package (and required dependencies):

# npm install restirator body-parser mongoose --save

Then use it like this:

var restirator = require('../lib/restirator');
var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');

var app = express();

app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

var mongoose = require('mongoose/'),
	db = mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/restirator-test'),
	Schema = mongoose.Schema;

// Create a schema for our data
var MessageSchema = new Schema({
  message: String,
  number: Number,
  date: Date
});

// Use the schema to register a model with MongoDb
mongoose.model('Message', MessageSchema); 
var Message = mongoose.model('Message');

// Run our lib.
restirator(db, app);

// Serve the front-end assets (that consume the API).
app.use(express.static('public'));

module.exports = app;

if (!module.parent) {
  app.listen(port, host, function () {
    console.log("Express server listening on port %d in %s mode",
    app.address().port,
    app.settings.env
  );
});

Generated API

• Search, GET /api/v1/<model name> with mongo search filters as query parameters
• Create, POST to /api/v1/<model name>
• Read, GET /api/v1/<model name>/<object id>
• Update, PUT /api/v1/<model name>/<object id>
• Delete, DELETE /api/v1/<model name>/<object id>

Testing restirator

There is a problem in having Express and Restify in the same Node.js process, as they both overwite features in Node's native http-object to make things easier, but end up confusing each other. What this means is you need to run the Express and Restify tests separately. To do so:

# mocha test/express_test.js 
# mocha test/restify_test.js

TODO

• [x] Configure path
• [x] Restify support
• [ ] CORS -headers
• [ ] Hapi support (if it makes sense)
• [ ] loopback support (if it makes sense)
• [ ] simple but solid authentication support (with mongoose plugins perhaps? or our own hooks? or register auth functions for express?)
• [ ] linking. HATEOAS?
• [ ] generate documentation and/or some kind of service descriptor
• [ ] "three kinds of wrong versioning" (configurable)
• [ ] http://jsonapi.org ?

More material

Below are interesting articles that heavily influenced the original design of restirator:

• https://strongloop.com/strongblog/compare-express-restify-hapi-loopback/
• http://cdnjs.com/libraries/backbone.js/tutorials/nodejs-restify-mongodb-mongoose
• http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/02/your-api-versioning-is-wrong-which-is.html
• https://spring.io/understanding/HATEOAS
• http://51elliot.blogspot.fi/2013/08/testing-expressjs-rest-api-with-mocha.html

License

The library is licensed under the MIT license, see LICENSE for more details.