hijacker

Hijacker

Hijacker can be used as an API relay to assist with front end development. It can intercept requests and responses between the client and the API server.

NOTE: Hijacker is in early development and subject may break config files from update to update.

NPM

Hijacker can be found on npm here

Getting Started

Hijacker is designed to be used alongside of an existing API so setting up a project is as simple as letting Hijacker know your API url and a list of rules you would like to intercept and then pointing your client to the Hijacker server instead of your API server. If no rule is provided for a given route, it will return the response from the API server, so Hijacker can be used with out any rules, and your application should function as if Hijacker is not there.

Installing

To install Hijacker, you can either install it to a specific project:

npm install hijacker

Or you can install it globally to allow use of the hijacker command in your terminal:

npm install -g hijacker

Setup

To set up a project for use with Hijacker a hijacker.conf.json file should be added to your project root. The file should be structured similar to below:

{
  "base_url": "http://api.base.com", // (REQUIRED) Base URL for API to intercept (without trailing backslash) requests for
  "port": 3000,  // Port to run the hijacker server on (Default: 3005)
  "rules": []    // List of rule objects for intercepting requests (Default: [])
}

Example:

Here is an basic config file that defines a rule for the route /cars. Every other route will make a request to https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com[route] and return the given response.

{
  "base_url": "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com",
  "port": 3000,
  "rules": [
    {
      "path": "/cars",
      "skipApi": true,
      "body": {
        "Hello": "World"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Running

Once you have have your config file set up in your project you can start the Hijacker server in the following ways:

Global Install

If you installed Hijacker globally, to start the server, all you need to do is run the following command in a directory that contains a configuration file:

hijacker

Local Install

If you installed Hijacker to a specific npm project you can run the following command in a directory with a configuration file:

./node_modules/.bin/hijacker

package.json Setup

In either installation case, you can add a command similar to the following to the scripts section of the package.json file of a project.

"scripts": {
  "hijacker": "hijacker"
}

And then you can run the following command in your node project to start the server:

npm run hijacker

Route Rule Object

Below are parameters that can be used in a route rule. Optional parameters will default to values from the original request/response.

Parameter	Default	Description
body	(optional)	Body object to send back to client in response
disabled	false	Flag to allow disabling a rule without deleting from list
interceptRequest	false	Ability to intercept request from client before sent to api
interceptResponse	false	Ability to intercept response from api before sent to client
keepHeaders	[]	List of headers to forward to api server
path	(required)	Apply rule to requests to paths that match
skipApi	false	Skip call to api server and send predefined response
method	All	HTTP method to apply the rule to
statusCode	(optional)	Status code to send back to the client

Future Work

Hijacker is currently under development with the following features planned:

• Dashboard to configure Hijacker rules
• Request/Response Breakpoints (Editing requests before they are sent to the API server and responses before they are sent back to the client) (Implemented but needs dashboard)
• More advanced route rules
  • Match paths with regex
  • Modify responses/requests w/ functions rather than replacing with object
• Support for multiple API's for a project
• Better CLI
• Allow use without an existing API server