restify

What is restify?

Restify is a Node.js web service framework optimized for building RESTful APIs. It is designed to be lightweight and efficient, making it ideal for creating scalable and high-performance web services.

What are restify's main functionalities?

Creating a Basic Server

This code demonstrates how to create a basic Restify server that listens on port 8080 and responds with 'Hello, world!' when a GET request is made to the '/hello' endpoint.

const restify = require('restify');
const server = restify.createServer();

server.get('/hello', (req, res, next) => {
  res.send('Hello, world!');
  next();
});

server.listen(8080, () => {
  console.log('%s listening at %s', server.name, server.url);
});

Middleware Support

This example shows how to use middleware in Restify. The bodyParser plugin is used to parse the body of incoming POST requests, and the server responds with the parsed body.

const restify = require('restify');
const server = restify.createServer();

server.use(restify.plugins.bodyParser());

server.post('/data', (req, res, next) => {
  res.send(req.body);
  next();
});

server.listen(8080, () => {
  console.log('%s listening at %s', server.name, server.url);
});

Error Handling

This code demonstrates how to handle errors in Restify. When a GET request is made to the '/error' endpoint, an InternalServerError is thrown. The 'restifyError' event is used to log the error and send an appropriate response.

const restify = require('restify');
const server = restify.createServer();

server.get('/error', (req, res, next) => {
  return next(new restify.errors.InternalServerError('Something went wrong!'));
});

server.on('restifyError', (req, res, err, callback) => {
  console.error(err);
  res.send(err);
  return callback();
});

server.listen(8080, () => {
  console.log('%s listening at %s', server.name, server.url);
});

Other packages similar to restify

express

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications. Compared to Restify, Express is more general-purpose and widely used for a variety of web applications, not just RESTful APIs.

hapi

Hapi is a rich framework for building applications and services in Node.js. It is known for its powerful plugin system and configuration-based approach. Hapi offers more built-in features and a different approach to configuration and extensibility compared to Restify.

koa

Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, aiming to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. Koa uses async functions to eliminate callback hell and improve error handling, offering a more modern approach compared to Restify.

README

node-restify is meant to do one thing: make it easy to build an API webservice in node.js that is correct as per the HTTP RFC. That's it. It's not MVC, it doesn't bring in a lot of baggage, it's just a small framework to let you build a web service API.

Why does this exist?

After starting with express for several backend, machine-consumed projects it because obvious I only needed about 10% of what connect gives you, and the parts they gave me still required writing a lot of extension code over the top to do what I needed (mainly properly parse request parameters and respond with JS objects).

I wanted something smaller and more purposed to this use case. If this isn't you, move along, nothing to see here.

Usage

var restify = require('restify');

var server = restify.createServer();

server.get('/my/:name', function(req, res) {
  res.send(200, {
    name: req.uriParams.name
  });
});

server.post('/my', function(req, res) {
  // name could be in the query string, in a form-urlencoded body, or a
  // JSON body
  res.send(201, {
    name: req.params.name
  });
});

server.del('/my/:name', function(req, res) {
  res.send(204);
});

server.listen(8080);

Installation

npm install restify

For More Information

See http://mcavage.github.com/node-restify.

License

MIT.

Bugs

See https://github.com/mcavage/node-restify/issues.