Introduction to Restify

Restify is a Node.js web service framework optimized for building semantically correct RESTful web services. It is focused on providing robust and reliable services with powerful routing and contextualizable request and response objects.

Setting Up Restify

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

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

Core APIs

Create Server

  const server = restify.createServer({
    name: 'myapp',
    version: '1.0.0'
  });

Routing

  server.get('/hello/:name', function(req, res, next) {
    res.send('hello ' + req.params.name);
    return next();
  });

  server.post('/hello', function(req, res, next) {
    res.send(201, 'hello ' + req.body.name);
    return next();
  });

Middleware Integration

  server.use(restify.plugins.acceptParser(server.acceptable));
  server.use(restify.plugins.queryParser());
  server.use(restify.plugins.bodyParser());

Error Handling

  server.on('restifyError', function(req, res, err, callback) {
    console.error(err.stack);
    res.send(err);
    callback();
  });

Contextualized Request and Response

  server.get('/context', function(req, res, next) {
    const data = {
      timestamp: new Date(),
      method: req.method,
      query: req.query
    };
    res.send(data);
    return next();
  });

Building an Application

Below is an example of a complete Restify application that demonstrates the use of the APIs discussed above.

  const restify = require('restify');
  const server = restify.createServer({
    name: 'myapp',
    version: '1.0.0'
  });
  
  server.use(restify.plugins.acceptParser(server.acceptable));
  server.use(restify.plugins.queryParser());
  server.use(restify.plugins.bodyParser());

  server.get('/hello/:name', function(req, res, next) {
    res.send('hello ' + req.params.name);
    return next();
  });

  server.post('/hello', function(req, res, next) {
    res.send(201, 'hello ' + req.body.name);
    return next();
  });

  server.on('restifyError', function(req, res, err, callback) {
    console.error(err.stack);
    res.send(err);
    callback();
  });

  server.get('/context', function(req, res, next) {
    const data = {
      timestamp: new Date(),
      method: req.method,
      query: req.query
    };
    res.send(data);
    return next();
  });

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

By following this example, you can quickly set up a robust and reliable RESTful API service using Restify.

Hash: d2eefe0f20b1e0199415bf95aa5a3675b13c9fa4c124e5d59f7c6b6b4da8c2b2