knex-router

Knex router

Small and to the point: use this Express router if you want a light way to have your database exposed as a JSON Restful API

For example:

• GET https://my.site/knex/users could return [{id: 1, name: 'John'}, {id: 2, name: 'Sue'}]
• GET https://my.site/knex/users/2 would return {id: 2, name: 'Sue'}
• DELETE https://my.site/knex/users/1 would remove John (user with ID 1) from your database.

Install

npm i --save knex-router

Setting it up

Asumming the usual express and Knex settings, you would have to do something like this:

  // import the module
  const knexRouter = require("./knexRouter");
  // import and set knex up
  const knex = require("knex")(...settings...);
  // use knex-router as a middleware, providing the knex instance
  app.use("/knex", knexRouter({ knex: knex }));

Routes available

This router provides the four basic DML operations (CRUD, or create, read, update and delete) through the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

Fetch all records from a table

Invoking

GET https://my.site/knex/users

will perform

SELECT * FROM users

and return the result as a JSON array.

Fetch one record by its primary key

Invoking

GET https://my.site/knex/users/33

will perform

SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 33

and return the result as a JSON object.

Creating a new record

Invoking

POST https://my.site/knex/users

will perform

INSERT INTO users (col1, col2) VALUES (1, 2)

using as values the ones provided in the HTTP POST request body.

Updating an existing record

Invoking

PUT https://my.site/knex/users/47

will perform

UPDATE users SET col1 = 'ab', col2 = 'cd' WHERE id = 47

using as values the ones provided in the HTTP request body.

Erasing a record by its ID

Invoking

DELETE http://my.site/knex/users/83

will perform

DELETE FROM users WHERE id = 83

and return the result Knex gives as JSON.

IMPORTANT: All this routes assume that the route name is the same as the table name, and that the primary key column is named id (if this isn't the case it can be customized, see next section)

Error handling

By default all requests handle the errors with console.error and sending a response status HTTP 500, and the error object as JSON.

Special cases

If your primary key is not called id -as the module uses by default- you can specify its name, on each call, with the URL query param idColumn. For example, if you call

GET https://mysite.com/knex/users/3?idColumn=user_id

it would yield the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM users where user_id = 3

Security

If you want to secure this router's routes, you can add any security middleware.

  app.use("/knex", authMiddleware, knexRouter({ knex: app.knex }));

More customized routes

Build your own, this is supposed to be small and simple!

Cache

All routes have implemented a cache preventing mechanism. No cache here!

Coming soon

• CI/CD validations and badges
• Unit tests
• LIMIT & OFFSET
• Basic WHERE filtering
• Ordering
• Logging (now is logging to console...)

Author

@luispablo