real-men

MEN stack API generator

Installation

npm i -g real-men

(if npm is not installed you will need Node.js)

Simple example

men test1

The result would be:

where each controller (only one in this case) will have the typical CRUD functions:

• GET: getAllFromItem (gets all documents from a given collection)
• GET: getOneItem (gets only one, given an id)
• POST: saveNewItem (saves a new document)
• PUT: updateItem (updates a document)
• DELETE: deleteItem (deletes a document)

Specifying entities

Many entities can be specified (being an entity the union controller + model + routes) as long as they're separated by commas with no spaces, for instance:

men test1 -e user,cat,cow,coffee

will generate:

Attributes specification

For a more specific data structure, a configuration file is needed. Such file must have a json extension and it looks like this:

{
  "entities": {
    "user": {
      "name": "String",
      "email": "String",
      "age": "Number"
    },
    "cat": {
      "isItAJerk": "Boolean",
      "catName": "String"
    },
    "cow": {
      "isItHoly": "Boolean",
      "birthday": "Date"
    },
    "coffee": {
      "isDecaf": "Boolean",
      "hasMilk": "Boolean"
    }
  }
}

and instead of this:

men test1 -e user,cat,cow,coffee

the line would be:

men test1 -e customMapping.json

API tester

The API tester will look different depending on the level of detail specified (being the highest the config file). For instance, the one for men test1 -e user,cat,cow,coffee would be:

and the one for men test1 -e customMapping.json would look like this (note that some data has been added):

Notes

• The default entity name is 'Item' and its model has just a string attribute: data
• Currently, the API tester does have support for String, Number, Date and Boolean types (based on the moongoose SchemaTypes), any type should be functional with the appropriate settings though
• The config file attribute types must always be strings ("String", "Number", "[]", etc.)
• If not given, the default database to connect/create will be <your-proyect-name>_DB, to specify a database use --database or -d
• The default port to run the server is 5501, change it with --port or -p
• Use --open or -o to automatically open the broswer and test the API
• Entity names and attributes must match ^[a-zA-Z_][0-9a-zA-Z_]*$
• Entity names are automatically capitalized
• Mongo daemon (mongod) must be running to be able to create/connect to the DB
• More info with men --help