simple-json-replay-server

Simple JSON Replay Server

Pefect companion with angular 1/2 development, and unit mock testing.

It is not a Restful Json Server

Have you spent a lot of time trying to find a simple straight-forward file based json replay server which will just matching url and query parameters and return response you expect?

You probably will be disappointed, because not all but at least majority of them are fancy shinning restful style severs which either return dynamic json in memory or manipulate some text based db files. And obviously, they will all require you to send standard restful style requests and then response with some dynamic results which you might have to think hard to set it up.

Isn't it overkill? if we just need a mock server for development and unit testing. Or, if you have legacy backend API design, which are not strictly following restful specifications.

Simple Features

• Simple command to launch it with optional port and folder configuration.
• Easy to maintain data Put a url and a response json in your replay data folder and you should get it right away.
• Advanced features to allow you set more matching rules including request parameter, method, header, cookie etc.
• Straight-foward rules to return best match results.
• Fast & Predictable, Once configured, it will response immediately and consitently.
• Flexible & Powerful, You can configure different rules to simulating different responses to cover different scenarios for the same service call.

How to start

Install to your package.json

npm install simple-json-replay-server --save-dev

Create app_mock folder under your application root

go to your application root folder, where it has package.json & your node_modules folder.

mkdir app_mock

Create mock data config files

Create a json file, eg. example.json inside of app_mock folder, you can create any layer of sub folders to hold this file.

Once start replay server, you can hit http://localhost:8008/test to see the result.

Please note: you are able to config a different port number if it conflicts.

Example:

{
    "request" : {
        "url": "test",
        "method" : "get"
    },
    "response" : {
        "status" : 200,
        "data" : {
            "message" : "you made it!"
        }
    }
}

Start the replay server

node node_modules/simple-json-replay-server/src/main.js

Integrate with your development work flow

As we all know, nowadays, most of frontend projects have been completely seperated from backend projects.

When we develop frontend application, we often tend to mock the data either directly in the code or hard-coded in backend service before implemented, which will requires some code changes during integration phase. And more often it is not easy to setup mock data which can cover many business scenarios.

With this simple json replay server approach, your code is always the same code which you will use in production, and in local development environment, you can route all your backend restful service calls to this replay server and thus you can run and play with your frontend application without ANY dependency on your backend server.

I will take two most popular frontend build tools/solutions for example:

1. Webpack (new fashionable toy)
2. Grunt (old world favorite , Gulp as well)

Webpack

Webpack based solution is gaining more popularity, and both angular 2 official and one of most popular tools - angular-cli are all using webpack as their build tool.