Get a full fake REST API with zero coding in less than 30 seconds (seriously)

Created with <3 for front-end developers who need a quick back-end for prototyping and mocking.

• Egghead.io free video tutorial - Creating demo APIs with json-server
• JSONPlaceholder - Live running version

See also hotel, a simple server manager.

Create a db.json file

{
  "posts": [
    { "id": 1, "title": "json-server", "author": "typicode" }
  ],
  "comments": [
    { "id": 1, "body": "some comment", "postId": 1 }
  ]
}

Start JSON Server

$ json-server --watch db.json

Now if you go to http://localhost:3000/posts/1, you'll get

{ "id": 1, "title": "json-server", "author": "typicode" }

Also, if you make POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE requests, changes will be automatically and safely saved to db.json using lowdb.

Based on the previous db.json file, here are all the default routes. You can also add other routes using --routes.

GET    /posts
GET    /posts/1
GET    /posts/1/comments
GET    /posts?title=json-server&author=typicode
POST   /posts
PUT    /posts/1
PATCH  /posts/1
DELETE /posts/1

To slice resources, add _start and _end or _limit (an X-Total-Count header is included in the response).

GET /posts?_start=20&_end=30
GET /posts/1/comments?_start=20&_end=30

To sort resources, add _sort and _order (ascending order by default).

GET /posts?_sort=views&_order=DESC
GET /posts/1/comments?_sort=votes&_order=ASC

To make a full-text search on resources, add q.

GET /posts?q=internet

To embed other resources, add _embed.

GET /posts/1?_embed=comments

Returns database.

GET /db

Returns default index file or serves ./public directory.

GET /

$ npm install -g json-server

You can use JSON Server to serve your HTML, JS and CSS, simply create a ./public directory.

mkdir public
echo 'hello word' > public/index.html
json-server db.json

You can access your fake API from anywhere using CORS and JSONP.

You can load remote schemas.

$ json-server http://example.com/file.json
$ json-server http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/db

You can create data programmatically.

Tip use modules like faker or casual.

// index.js
module.exports = function() {
  var data = { users: [] }
  // Create 1000 users
  for (var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
    data.users.push({ id: i, name: 'user' + i })
  }
  return data
}

$ json-server index.js

Create a routes.json file.

{
  "/api/": "/",
  "/blog/:resource/:id/show": "/:resource/:id"
}

Start JSON Server with --routes option.

json-server db.json --routes routes.json

Now you can access resources using additional routes.

/api/posts
/api/posts/1
/blog/posts/1/show

If you need to add authentication, validation, you can use the project as a module in combination with other Express middlewares.

var jsonServer = require('json-server')

// Returns an Express server
var server = jsonServer.create()

// Set default middlewares (logger, static, cors and no-cache)
server.use(jsonServer.defaults)

// Returns an Express router
var router = jsonServer.router('db.json')
server.use(router)

server.listen(3000)

For an in-memory database, you can pass an object to jsonServer.router(). Please note also that jsonServer.router() can be used in existing Express projects.

To modify responses, use router.render():

// In this example, returned resources will be wrapped in a body property
router.render = function (req, res) {
  res.jsonp({
   body: res.locals.data
  }) 
}

To add rewrite rules, use jsonServer.rewriter():

// Add this before server.use(router)
server.use(jsonServer.rewriter({
  '/api/': '/',
  '/blog/:resource/:id/show: '/:resource/:id'
})

Alternatively, you can also mount the router on another path.

server.use('/api', router)

You can deploy JSON Server. For example, JSONPlaceholder is an online fake API powered by JSON Server and running on Heroku.

• Creating Demo APIs with json-server on egghead.io

• Node Module Of The Week - json-server
• Mock up your REST API with JSON Server
• how to build quick json REST APIs for development
• ng-admin: Add an AngularJS admin GUI to any RESTful API
• Fast prototyping using Restangular and Json-server

• Grunt JSON Server
• Docker JSON Server
• JSON Server GUI

MIT - Typicode