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.
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);
});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 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 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.
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.
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.
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);
npm install restify
Currently both application/x-www-form-urlencoded and application/json are supported where API calls take parameters. For exmaple, all of the following are valid calls:
Query String (on the uri):
POST /my?first_name=mark&last_name=c HTTP/1.1
Host: your.host.name
Authorization: ...
Content-Lenght: 0
Form encoded in the body:
POST /my HTTP/1.1
Host: your.host.name
Authorization: ...
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 123
first_name=mark&last_name=c
JSON in the body:
POST /my HTTP/1.1
Host: your.host.name
Authorization: ...
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 123
{
"first_name": "mark",
"last_name": "c"
}
These formats all get merged into request.params.
RESTify sends the following headers in all API calls:
If there is content, you can expect:
Response formats are goverened by the 'Accept' header. Currently, the following are supported:
JSON responses are the default (so passing nothing, /, or application/* into
for Accept gets you back application/json). You simply call the response.send
API with your JS object, and it gets marshalled. On my TODO list are supporting
XML and whatever else people ask for (msgpack/protobuf/etc).
If you get back any error code in the 4xx range, you will receive a formatted error message of the scheme:
{
"code": "CODE",
"message": "human readable string"
}
Where the code element is one of:
Clients are expected to check HTTP status code first, and if in the 4xx range,
they can leverage the codes above. To send your own error, leverage the error
API. Basically do this:
var newError = require('restify').newError;
return response.sendError(newError({
httpCode: 409,
restCode: 'YourErrorCode',
message: 'Some human parsable error string'
}));
Would produce a full response to the client like:
HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
Server: node.js
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:52:45 GMT
X-API-Version: 2011-004-25
X-Request-Id: C94A6FD8-9C37-405D-B66A-47E7B7D0F800
X-Response-Time: 13
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 123
Content-MD5: VOLosaU+eL4laO6gP5KiTw==
{
"code": "YourErrorCode"
"message": "Some human parsable error string"
}
To leverage the built in error codes, pick up restify.RestCodes. Also, HTTP
constants are defined on restify.HttpCodes.
Like every other framework on the planet, I liberally made this look like Sinatra. You don't get full on regex's, but I've never had a reason, when trying to write a simple REST api to need them. Want them? Go use something else. Basically you can define routes like:
server.get('/:foo/:bar', pre, handler, post);
Where pre is an array of functions, handler is a function, and post is another
array of functions. Note you can pass in one function, one array, whatever. I
am simply saying this is following the Interceptor pattern that exists in
something like Java servers (e.g. Jetty). The :foo and :bar become parameters
of the name foo, bar, respectively on req.params. As described above, any
query params or body content get tacked in there too. If you have conflicting
params, we throw. So don't do that.
As to route methods, no silly webdav or anything, just:
You create a server with the createServer(options) call:
var server = restify.createServer({
apiVersion: '2011-04-25', // Kicked back in X-Api-Version response header
serverName: 'RESTify', // Kicked back in Server response header
requireApiVersion: true, // Enforce clients sending you a version header
installExceptionHandler: true // Handle uncaught exceptions with a 500
});
Supported parameters in options are listed above. apiVersion is enforced if
sent in the x-api-version HTTP header. Setting requireApiVersion requires
a client to send it (typically you want this with a web service API so you're
not supporting some weird version 0 for all of time). Note that if you don't
set apiVersion the default set in lib/constants.js is sent back (which is a
YYYY-MM-DD string), so that's probably not what you want. Set it ;-). Setting
serverName lets you set the server header on all responses. The
installExceptionHandler flag gets you a generic 500 response if you didn't
catch an exception.
As described above, tack get/post/put/del/head onto the server object.
Basically there's only a few new things tacked onto your familiar node request
object:
I tacked quite a bit onto the response object:
As described above, grab the error creation function with:
var newError = require('restify').newError;
response.send(newError({
httpCode: HttpCodes.NotFound,
restCode: 'ClientParsableString',
message: 'Some string meant for a human'
});
Why does this exist? Because clients typically need more than just an HTTP status code to make an intelligent decision (400/409 means a lot of things...). And it gives you a natural place to start thinking about where to put translated strings.
Oh yeah, I wrote a simple logger for this (simple log4j-like thing). You get the following levels:
These all write to stderr, and you'll get formats like:
2011-03-25 20:28:21Z TRACE: Some message string here
Basically, YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SSZ LEVEL: Your string here. You get sprintf-like
functionality in the name of %s, %d, and %o for strings, numbers and
objects, respectively. You can set the log level on the server with:
server.logLevel(restify.LogLevel.Debug);
Default level is Info. Setting it to Trace gets you debug output from the restify framework. Debug is meant for you. Isn't that sweet? You can grab the logger with:
var log = require('restify').log;
Also, as in log4j, to avoid a crapload of stack-based string building when you're not even in that level, you can wrap all log calls with:
if (log.debug()) {
log.debug('Some message I %s: %o', 'made up', {foo: 'bar'});
}
That works on all the levels.
MIT.
FAQs
REST framework
The npm package restify receives a total of 189,747 weekly downloads. As such, restify popularity was classified as popular.
We found that restify demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 15 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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