Osprey

Osprey is a JavaScript framework, based on Node and Express, for rapidly building applications that expose APIs described via RAML, the RESTful API Modeling Language. Along with its companion CLI project, Osprey takes an API-first approach: the RAML API defines the contract between the applicatiorn and its consumers, which Osprey helps enforce and implement, together with its CLI.

Important

The current release of Osprey is very much a work in progress. As it is in active use within a number of rapid development projects, it too is evolving with the needs those projects uncover. While it is proving extremely beneficial, because it's still evolving rapidly we don't yet feel it meets our criteria for a first fully stable release.

We encourage you to use it and participate by raising issues, providing feedback or contributing your own code (see below)

Coming Soon

Please check the Osprey 1.0 Milestone issues list to stay up-to-date with the immediate roadmap.

Fundamentals

Major features include:

• Automatic Validations:
  • Form, URI, and query parameters
  • Headers
  • JSON and XML schemas
• Default parameters
• Exception handling
• Auto-generated mocks for the APIs your application exposes, as long as you define sample responses in the RAML file.
• API Console: Auto-generated documentation displayed on an interactive web application, allowing the developer to easily invoke the APIs.

Related projects

Check out Osprey-CLI, the scaffolding tool that generates Osprey-based applications from a RAML spec with just a single command.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing some code to this project, thanks! Please submit a Contributors Agreement acknowledging that you are transferring ownership.

To discuss this project, please use its github issues or the RAML forum.

Prerequisites

To start using Osprey you'll need the following:

• Node JS
• NPM

Getting started

npm install osprey

Note: You can ignore warnings appearing during osprey installation. Most of these are thrown by libraries being used. You can always review the warnings in case the installation is not successful.

Option A (Recommended)

1. Scaffold a new application by using the Osprey-CLI. You'll define an [output folder] there.
2. Check the resulting directories structure.

 [output folder]
    |--Gruntfile.js
    |--package.json
    |--src
    |  |--app.js
    |  |--assets
    |   |--raml
    |     |--api.raml
    |-test

• Get familiar with the basic structure
• Notice the [output folder]/src/assets/raml folder. If you specified an existing RAML file, or folder containing RAML definitions, those will be copied here. If not, you will find an empty RAML file named api.raml
• Also notice [output folder]/src/app.js. This is the main application file. Here you will start registering your resources and coding your logic (or routing to it).

3. If you are working with an empty RAML file, you need to start capturing your API spec in it. The RAML file describes your API and is used by Osprey to match with resources registered on app.js, validate, etc.
4. Edit /[output_folder]/src/app.js to start registering resources (check this out under the "Key Concepts" section in this readme).

Option B

You can check the example included with Osprey to see a fully functional application, and then create one by following the same patterns.

Run your Osprey application

From your terminal run: grunt (recommended: It will set up the proper listeners so changes in the code are automatically refreshed in runtime).

OR you can always run: node src/app.js

Accessing the API Console

Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000/api/console/ to display the API Console.

Key Concepts

Note that you first need to create an Express app before initializing Osprey. This is taken care of automatically by Osprey CLI, or you can just refer to the examples.

Osprey Initialization

api = osprey.create('/api', app, {
  logLevel: 'debug'
});

Arguments

• /api is the basePath where you'd like to host the API
• app is your Express App
• the third argument is an optional settings object:

| Option name | Default Value | Description | |:------------------|:---------------|:---------------| | ramlFile | process.cwd() + '/src/assets/raml/api.raml' | Where the RAML file is being stored | | enableConsole | true | Enables the embedded API console | | consolePath | /console | Defines the url for the API console relative to the apiPath | | enableMocks | true | Enables the mocking capability | | enableValidations | true | Enables validation | | exceptionHandler | {} | Registers exception handlers | | logLevel | off | Sets the logging level: one of ['off', 'info', 'debug'] |

Resources registration

Each resource in the API must be registered as follows:

api.get('/teams/:teamId', function(req, res) {
  // Your business logic here!
  // E.g.:
  res.send({ name: 'test' });
});

The path indicated by the first argument to api.get, api.post, etc. is always relative to the basePath defined in api.create.

Other supported methods

• api.get
• api.post
• api.put
• api.delete
• api.head
• api.patch

Exception Handling

Osprey allows handling exceptions in a very reusable way.

First you have to setup the exceptionHandler module:

api = osprey.create('/api', app, {
  exceptionHandler: {
    InvalidUriParameterError: function (err, req, res) {
      // Overwriting the default implementation
      res.send (400);
    },
    CustomError: function (err, req, res) {
      // Do something here!
      res.send (400);
    }
  }
});

If a resource throws an error of type CustomError, the exception handler module will handle it.

api.get('/teams', function (req, res) {
  throw new CustomError('some exception');
});

Default Errors

| Name | HTTP Status| Description | |:---------------------------|:----|:---------------| | InvalidAcceptTypeError | 406 | When the type in the Accept header is not supported by the API | | InvalidContentTypeError | 415 | When the type in the Content-Type header is not supported by the API | | InvalidUriParameterError | 400 | When a URI parameter is invalid according to the validation rules | | InvalidFormParameterError | 400 | When a form parameter is invalid according to the validation rules | | InvalidQueryParameterError | 400 | When a query parameter is invalid according to the validation rules | | InvalidHeaderError | 400 | When a request header is invalid according to the validation rules | | InvalidBodyError | 400 | When a request body is invalid according to the validation schemas |

Validations

You can enable or disable validations by using the option enableValidations in osprey.create.

Supported Validations

• URI parameters
• Query parameters
• Form parameters
• Headers
• JSON Schema
• XML Schema

Notes

In order to support XML schema validation, you need to setup express-xml-bodyparser middleware in your application:

1. Add the dependency into the package.json:

"dependencies": {
    ...,
    "express-xml-bodyparser": "0.0.4"
  },

2. Import the module: var xmlparser = require('express-xml-bodyparser');
3. Indicate you application will be using it: app.use(xmlparser());

Example

  var express   = require('express');
  var path      = require('path');
  var osprey    = require('osprey');
  var app       = module.exports = express()
  var xmlparser = require('express-xml-bodyparser'); // Only if XML Schema validations are needed

  app.use(express.json());
  app.use(express.urlencoded());
  app.use(express.logger('dev'));
  app.use(xmlparser()); // Only if XML Schema validations are needed

  app.set('port', process.env.PORT || 3000));

  var api = osprey.create('/api', app);

  api.get('/resource', function(req, res) {
    // Your business logic here!
  });

  if (!module.parent) {
    var port = app.get('port');
    app.listen(port);
    console.log('listening on port ' + port);
  }