headrest

Provides a RESTful, CORS enabled webserver intended for use when developing rest-backed Javascript apps for the browser. If you want to click around in your app, create/read/update/delete objects, but not fire up an entire backend, that is what this is for.

Assumes you init your JS app with or otherwise set an api root URL from which your models build the correct URL for their resource.

You can set the apiRoot like:

headrest = require('headrest')(apiRoot: '/apis/', dbPath: '/tmp/gruntest.json')
# headrest is an express app

Resources

It assumes your resources have paths like:

• for a list of resources (index), /api/rocks or nested as deep as you like - /api/rocks/ffeedc/sedimentaries and so on.
• for a single resource, /api/rocks/ffeedc, also nested as far as you want.

Sessions

Implements sessions at /api/session.

• POST whatever you want to /api/session, you'll get a Cookie.

• GET /api/session - HTTP 200 means you're logged in, 404 if not.

• DELETE /api/session - removes your session record and sets your cookie to expire.

Example Gruntfile.coffee

headrest = require('headrest')(apiRoot: '/apis/', dbPath: '/tmp/gruntest.json')


module.exports = (grunt) ->
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-connect')

  grunt.registerTask('headrest',
    [
      'connect'
    ]
  )

  grunt.initConfig
    connect:
      headrest:
        options:
          port: 5001
          hostname: "0.0.0.0"
          keepalive: true
          middleware: (connect, options) ->
            [headrest]

grunt headrest

This will start the server on http://0.0.0.0:5001/. From a browser, you can create an object with:

var request = $.ajax({
  url: "http://localhost:5001/apis/rocks",
  dataType: "json",
  crossDomain: true,
  type: 'POST',
  data: {name: "sedimentary"}
})

request.done(function(d) {
  var rock = JSON.parse(d)
  console.log( rock.id )
})

// console output:
// > 7cf28fd544be1b7f55296c45d40538f

var request = $.ajax({
  url: "http://localhost:5001/apis/rocks/7cf28fd544be1b7f55296c45d40538f",
  dataType: "json",
  crossDomain: true,
  type: 'PUT',
  data: {name: "Igneous"}
})

request.done(function(d) {
  console.log('updated')
})

var request = $.ajax({
  url: "http://localhost:5001/apis/rocks/7cf28fd544be1b7f55296c45d40538f",
  dataType: "json",
  crossDomain: true,
  type: 'DELETE'
})

request.done(function(d) {
  console.log('removed')
})

TODO:

• allow setting of session path.

Contributing

Fork and

npm install

npm test

or

cake test:watch

Or if any of this code is wack and you think there's a better way to do it, I definitely want to hear about it, no joke.

That's it!

I yanked this idea from my homie Mark's footrest.py