dunglas / awesome-rest

A collaborative list of great resources about RESTful API architecture, development, test, and performance

Awesome REST

A collaborative list of great resources about RESTful API architecture, development, test, and performance. Feel free to contribute to this on-going list.

• Design
• Standards
• Clients
  • PHP
  • Client-side JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • Ruby
  • Go
• Servers
  • Directly On Top Of A RMDB
  • Node.js
  • PHP
  • Symfony2
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Go
• Testing
  • Querying
  • Mocking
  • Public REST APIs To Use In Tests
• Documentation
• SaaS Tools
• Miscellaneous

Design

• HTTP API design guide extracted from work on the Heroku Platform API
• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
• How to design a REST API? - a full guide tackling security, pagination, filtering, versioning, partial answers, CORS, etc.
• Enterprise Integration Using REST by the famous Martin Fowler
• HATEOAS - a clear explanation on what HATEOAS is, and why you should use it.
• How to GET a cup of coffee

Standards

• JSON API - a standard for building APIs in JSON
• RAML - a simple and succinct way to describe RESTful API
• JSend - a simple specification that lays down some rules for how JSON responses from web servers should be formatted
• OData - an open protocol to allow the creation and consumption of queryable and interoperable RESTful APIs. Quite complex.
• HAL - a simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API (see: HATEOAS).
• JSON-LD JSON-LD Web site
• Hydra A Vocabulary for Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs (W3C)

Clients

PHP Clients

• Guzzle - HTTP client and framework for consuming RESTful web services
• Buzz - another lightweight HTTP client
• unirest for PHP - Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library

JavaScript Clients

• restangular - AngularJS service to handle REST API properly and easily
• restful.js - a JS client for interacting with server-side RESTful resources

Node.js Clients

• restler - REST client library for node.js
• unirest for Node.js - Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library

Ruby Clients

• RESTClient - Simple HTTP and REST client for Ruby, inspired by microframework syntax for specifying actions.
• Spyke - Interact with REST services in an ActiveRecord-like manner.
• excon - Usable, fast, simple Ruby HTTP 1.1. It works great as a general HTTP(s) client and is particularly well suited to usage in API clients.

Go Clients

• gopencils - Small and simple package to easily consume REST APIs.

Servers

Directly On Top Of A RMDB

• postgrest - serve a fully RESTful API directly from an existing PostgreSQL database
• MySQL HTTP plugin - A simple REST-like / CRUD server for any MySQL database

Node.js

• node-restify - a framework specifically meant for REST API
• Sails.js - a Node.js Web framework embedding a command to generate automatically a REST API
• mers - an Express service to expose Mongoose finders as RESTful API
• Baucis - build scalable REST API based on your Mongoose entities
• flatiron/resourceful - an isomorphic Resource engine for JavaScript
• loopback - powerful Node.js framework for creating APIs and easily connecting to backend data sources

PHP

• Microrest - a micro-web application providing a REST API on top of any relational database
• Negotiation - A content negotiation library.
• Drest - A library for exposing Doctrine entities as REST resource endpoints.
• Restler - A lightweight framework to expose PHP methods as RESTful web API.
• HAL - A Hypertext Application Language (HAL) builder library.
• Apigility - An API builder built with Zend Framework 2.
• phprest - specialized REST microframework for PHP
• Hateoas - a PHP library to support implementing representations for HATEOAS REST web services

Symfony2

• REST APIs with Symfony2: the Right Way - a complete guide to build a state-of-the-art REST API with Symfony2 framework
• FOSRestBundle - bundle handling view, routing, error handling, etc. for your REST API
• stanlemon/rest-bundle - build a REST API based on Doctrine entities using conventions over configuration
• lakion/Lionframe - a glu between several community libraries to ease API development
• BazingaHateoasBundle - integrate the Hateoas library into a Symfony2 application
• Symfony REST Edition - start with a Symfony2 application with all REST-friendly bundles pre-configured
• NgAdminGeneratorBundle - boostrap ng-admin configuration based on stanlemon/rest-bundle
• DunglasApiBundle - build a REST API which follow Hydra/JSON-LD specification

Python

• django-tastypie - Creating delicious APIs for Django apps.
• flask-restful - An extension for Flask that adds support for quickly building REST APIs.
• flask-restless - A Flask extension for generating ReSTful APIs for database models defined with SQLAlchemy (or Flask-SQLAlchemy).
• sandman - Automated REST APIs for existing database-driven systems.
• restless - Framework agnostic REST framework based on lessons learned from TastyPie.
• savory-pie - REST API building library (django, and others)

Ruby

• Grape - An opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.

Go

• go-json-rest - a thin layer on top of net/http that helps building RESTufmigl API easily
• sleepy - a RESTful micro-framework written in Go
• restit - A Go micro framework to help writing RESTful API integration test
• go-relax - A framework of pluggable components to build RESTful API's
• go-rest - A small and evil REST framework for Go
• Goat - A minimalistic REST API server in Go
• Resoursea - A REST framework for quickly writing resource based services.
• Zerver - Zerver is a expressive, modular, feature completed RESTful framework.

Testing

Querying

• httpie - a command line HTTP client, far more dev-friendly than curl
• Postman REST Client - a Chrome extension essential to test manually REST API
• resty - little command line REST client that you can use in pipelines (bash or zsh)
• jq - command line JSON processor, to use in combination with a command-line HTTP client like cURL

Mocking

• FakeRest - patch XMLHttpRequest to fake a REST API client-side
• json-server - serve a REST API from fixture files using quick prototyping

Public REST APIs To Use In Tests

• Public APIS - Explore The Largest API Directory In The Galaxy
• Marvel Comics API - query characters, stories, events about Marvel superheroes
• JSON Placeholder - a free online REST service that you can use whenever you need some fake data.

Documentation

• Swagger - Documentation/querying web interface for REST APIs
• API doc - Inline Documentation for RESTful web APIs

SaaS tools

• Runscope - Automated API Monitoring & Testing
• import.io Magic - Create a REST API from any website in one click
• Apiary - Collaborative design, instant API mock, generated documentation, integrated code samples, debugging and automated testing.

Miscellaneous

• ng-admin - add an AngularJS admin GUI to any RESTful API