RESTful Goose

Yet another RESTful microservice generator for Mongoose with an emphasis on flexibility. This API uses the JSON API spec and supports optional child models.

Version: 2.2.10

What's New

2.2.6

• Small bug fixes

2.2.3

• Fixed include bug where the dependent documents were not being returned in the response
• Fixed crashing when trying to DELETE or UPDATE a non-existent model

2.2.22

• Removed morgan middleware on api sub-app

2.2.21

• The serializer was crashing when undefined was being passed where an array was expected. This has been fixed.
• Fixed an issue with link objects being serialized inside the data member for relationships.
• Minor refactoring to code to improve readability, efficiency, and documentation
• Began work on some future features (such as selective model APIs, smart link building, prefix support, etc.)

2.2

• Added advanced filtering inspired by json-api npm package. Just do ?filter[simple][updated-at][$lte]=!
• Fixed sorting

Installation

npm install restful-goose

Use

Version 2 of RESTful Goose is much easier to use. The constructor only requires one argument: a Mongoose Connection.

var restfulGoose = require('restful-goose');
var mongoose = require('mongoose');

mongoose.connect('localhost');
restfulGoose(mongoose).listen(3000);

Your API will be listening for connections on port 3000.

Alternatively, and probably the more common use, would be to mount RESTful Goose under your existing Express app so you can take advantage of authentication middlewares and the like:

var express = require('express');
var restfulGoose = require('restfulGoose');
var mongoose = require('mongoose');

var app = express();
var myMiddleware = [passport.authenticate('bearer'), validateUser];

app.use('/api', myMiddleware, restfulGoose(mongoose));

app.listen(3000);

Customization

The best part about RESTful Goose 2 is the much greater flexibility you have to customize how the app handles individual routes.

Every route goes through an event loop, calling a series of functions that you can hook at nearly every stage of handling a request.

The base restfulGoose export exposes the RouteMap object, which you can copy via the object's extend() method:

/* post-route.js */
var RouteMap = require('restful-goose').RouteMap;

module.exports = RouteMap.extend({
    beforeModel: function(req, res, next) {
        // Modify the query to only return users' own posts
        req.query.user = req.user.id;
    }
});

Then bind your custom map to your restfulGoose instance using the instance's defineRoute() method:

/* app.js */
var restfulGoose = require('restful-goose');
var postRoute = require('./post-route');
// ...

var api = restfulGoose(mongoose);

/* defineRoute(modelName, routeMapObject) */
api.defineRoute('Post', postRoute);

BETA: Selective models

It is now possible to pass an options object with a models key that contains an array of mongoose Model constructors (so not Document instances, but the actual Model class you invoke with the mongoose.model() method). Use this if you only want to make some models available via the API. WARNING: this is a beta feature and isn't yet fully implemented. As of now, only top level endpoints are disabled. Relationship objects still populate even if a model isn't included in the API.

TODO

• The ability to specify a prefix for constructed link objects (and perhaps smarter link construction)