/awesome-rest

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

Awesome REST Awesome

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

  • JSON API - Standard for building APIs in JSON.
  • RAML - Simple and succinct way to describe RESTful API.
  • JSend - Simple specification that lays down some rules for how JSON responses from web servers should be formatted.
  • OData - Open protocol to allow the creation and consumption of queryable and interoperable RESTful APIs. Quite complex.
  • HAL - Simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API (see: HATEOAS).
  • JSON-LD - Standard for describing Linked Data and hypermedia relations in JSON (W3C).
  • Hydra - Vocabulary for Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs (W3C).
  • Schema.org - Collection of schemas describing common data models.

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 - JS client for interacting with server-side RESTful resources.
  • traverson - A Hypermedia API/HATEOAS Client for Node.js and the Browser

Node.js Clients

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 - Simple REST-like / CRUD server for any MySQL database.

Node.js

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

PHP

  • Microrest - Micro-web application providing a REST API on top of any relational database.
  • Negotiation - Content negotiation library.
  • Drest - Library for exposing Doctrine entities as REST resource endpoints.
  • Restler - Lightweight framework to expose PHP methods as RESTful web API.
  • HAL - Hypertext Application Language (HAL) builder library.
  • Apigility - API builder built with Zend Framework 2.
  • phprest - Specialized REST microframework for PHP.
  • Hateoas - PHP library to support implementing representations for HATEOAS REST web services.
  • PHP Schema - Generator of PHP data model using schemas from Schema.org.

Symfony2

Python

  • Django REST framework - Powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.
  • django-tastypie - Creating delicious APIs for Django apps.
  • flask-restful - Extension for Flask that adds support for quickly building REST APIs.
  • flask-restless - 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 - Opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.

Go

  • gocrud: Go library to simplify creating, updating and deleting arbitrary depth structured data — to make building REST services fast and easy.
  • go-json-rest - Thin layer on top of net/http that helps building RESTful APIs easily.
  • sleepy - RESTful micro-framework written in Go.
  • restit - Go micro framework to help writing RESTful API integration test.
  • go-relax - Framework of pluggable components to build RESTful API's.
  • go-rest - Small and evil REST framework for Go.
  • go-restful - A declarative highly readable framework for building restful API's.
  • Goat - Minimalistic REST API server in Go.
  • Resoursea - REST framework for quickly writing resource based services.
  • Zerver - Zerver is a expressive, modular, feature completed RESTful framework.

Java

  • RestExpress - Netty-based, highly performant, lightweight, container-less, plugin-extensible, framework that is ideal for microservice architectures.

Testing

Querying

  • httpie - Command line HTTP client, far more dev-friendly than curl.
  • Postman REST Client - 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.
  • HttpMaster - GUI tool for testing REST APIs and services. Windows OS only.

Mocking

  • FakeRest - Patch XMLHttpRequest to fake a REST API client-side.
  • json-server - Serve a REST API from fixture files using quick prototyping.
  • Mocky.io - Free online service to create fake HTTP responses.
  • Swagger API Mock - Mock RESTful API based on swagger schema

Public REST APIs To Use In Tests

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.

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.