Rails REST Framework

A framework for DRY RESTful APIs in Ruby on Rails.

The Problem: Building controllers for APIs usually involves writing a lot of redundant CRUD logic, and routing them can be obnoxious. Building and maintaining features like ordering, filtering, and pagination can be tedious.

The Solution: This framework implements browsable API responses, CRUD actions for your models, and features like ordering/filtering/pagination, so you can focus on building awesome APIs.

Website/Guide: rails-rest-framework.com

Demo API: rails-rest-framework.com/api/demo

Source: github.com/gregschmit/rails-rest-framework

YARD Docs: rubydoc.info/gems/rest_framework

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rest_framework'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself with:

$ gem install rest_framework

Quick Usage Tutorial

Controller Mixins

To transform a controller into a RESTful controller, you can either include BaseControllerMixin, ReadOnlyModelControllerMixin, or ModelControllerMixin. BaseControllerMixin provides a root action and a simple interface for routing arbitrary additional actions:

class ApiController < ApplicationController
  include RESTFramework::BaseControllerMixin
  self.extra_actions = {test: :get}

  def test
    render api_response({message: "Test successful!"})
  end
end

ModelControllerMixin assists with providing the standard model CRUD for your controller.

class Api::MoviesController < ApiController
  include RESTFramework::ModelControllerMixin

  self.recordset = Movie.where(enabled: true)
end

ReadOnlyModelControllerMixin only enables list/show actions, but since we're naming this controller in a way that doesn't make the model obvious, we can set that explicitly:

class Api::ReadOnlyMoviesController < ApiController
  include RESTFramework::ReadOnlyModelControllerMixin

  self.model = Movie
end

Note that you can also override the get_recordset instance method to override the API behavior dynamically per-request.

Routing

You can use Rails' resource/resources routers to route your API, however if you want extra_actions / extra_member_actions to be routed automatically, then you can use rest_route for non-resourceful controllers, or rest_resource / rest_resources resourceful routers. You can also use rest_root to route the root of your API:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  rest_root :api  # will find `api_controller` and route the `root` action to '/api'
  namespace :api do
    rest_resources :movies
    rest_resources :users
  end
end

Or if you want the API root to be routed to Api::RootController#root:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  namespace :api do
    rest_root  # will route `Api::RootController#root` to '/' in this namespace ('/api')
    rest_resources :movies
    rest_resources :users
  end
end

Development/Testing

After you clone the repository, cd'ing into the directory should create a new gemset if you are using RVM. Then run bundle install to install the appropriate gems.

To run the test suite:

$ rails test

The top-level bin/rails proxies all Rails commands to the test project, so you can operate it via the usual commands. Ensure you run rails db:setup before running rails server or rails console.