apinode

apinode

An API server which can greatly reduce the work when implementing your own API services.

Get Started

It's quite easy to set up your own API server using apinode. Below is a sample code:

var  apiNode = require('apinode');

var  config = {
        appPath: "...",
        logDir: "..."
     };

apiNode.init( config );
apiNode.restart();

Yes, it's that simple. You initialize apinode with a config object, and set sail of it. The configuration usually has at least two properties: the "appPath" property specifying where is your application code and the "logDir" specifying the log directory where apinode will dump its output log.

Write Your Own Service

To start with, let's depict the file structure of a typical apinode project:

+ lib
  + app
    + _api
    + app_1
      + resource_1
        + op_1
        + op_2
      + resource_2
      + ...
    + app_2
    + ... app_n

The enpoints served by apinode are formulated as app/resource/op. For example, admin/user/login is a built-in service endpoint of apinode. If you want to create an endpoint as blog/article/list, you should create a listOp.js file under the lib/app/blog/article directory.

The Operator

The actual API services should be provided by operators. An operator is a node module which should be saved in the lib/app/your_app/your_resource directory so it can be found and invoked by apinode. An operator should at least define a run() function to offer the intended service. Below is a very simple example:

exports.fun = function(rt, cb)  {
    this.answerOk('Hello There!', cb);
}

The rt parameter carries the run-time environment and cb is the callback function to indicate an operator has finished its job. Since this is a very short introduction, we'll not touch too many ground. The apinode module itself contains a built-in app called "admin" which is under the lib/app/admin direcoty. You can browse through that direcoty and find quite a few operator examples.