When testing out ideas for the front end I often have to copy over the entire backend in ROR (which is convenient) but rather memory intensive.
So I came across this “workaround” that allows for the creation of a local rest API.
So the steps are so :
- install the json-server
npm install -g json-server
This is important as a step & you should ensure that json-server -v (in my case it returns 0.16.3) returns some output to ensure that json-server is actually installed. I followed some online examples and they did not do a good job of explaining that & for those reasons I could not even get json-server started.
- create your seed data
Firstly create your db file, calling it db.json and you can enter text using any text editor, some people recommend nano or pico so
pico db.json. Once you have the editor up enter the following data in the following format
{API_URL_KEYWORD
:
[
ARRAY_OF_DATA_FIELDS_&_VALUES
]
}
The API_URL_KEYWORD is what you use when you are accessing your API : http://localhost:PORTNUMBER/API_URL_KEYWORD
As for ARRAY_OF_DATA_FIELDS_&_VALUES they are formatted so:
{
FIELD_1
:
FIELD_1_VALUE
,
FIELD_2
:
FIELD_2_VALUE
,
.
.
.
FIELD_N
:
FIELD_N_VALUE
,
}
So an example of the above is so:
{
"wordlist"
:
[
{
"id"
:
1
,
"word"
:
"Avalon"
,
"definition"
:
"Bucolic paradisical place."
}
,
{
"id"
:
2
,
"word"
:
"Arthur"
,
"definition"
:
"Monarch."
}
]
}
Following is how seed data works in my file db.json : you have to put a carriage return or end of line after every field or field value or delimiter.
Once you are done with this you can run your local API so:
json-server DB_FILE -p PORTNUMBER
In our case specifically it is:
json-server db.json -p 1111
So the screenshot of a running json-server looks so:
And the screenshot of a running api looks so :
And the entire src along with some references is here: src