This is a (small) sample app using a reasonable subset of restify components to illustrate how you go about structuring a restify application. This is pretty minimal, and most logic is contained in server.js; in reality, you'd probably break up your logic into a set of files that are easier to maintain. But for the purpose of this app, that suffices.

I just cooked up a small "TODO" REST API. You get a simple CRUD interface over JSON on managing TODOs, and TODOs are stored locally on the file system. The code should be commented enough to help you make sense of it.

I cooked up a small server, and a small client wrapper to illustrate how I usually use restify in my own projects; typically, I have a server application that does whatever API thing I need it to do, and I "wrap" the restify client(s) as appropriate to deliver a "high-level" SDK that users can code against; note I tend to try to hide HTTP when you're at that level so the system is easier to work with.

I also cooked up a small set of unit tests using nodeunit, as several times questions have come up as to how to mock, or unit test a restify service. I typically structure my app so that I can either:

• Run it on a UNIX Domain Socket as part of the unit test
• Just require an endpoint to be running, and pass it in as an env var

Here I chose the former option; run with npm test.

First, this has a package.json, so you'll need to run npm install in the directory. Once you've done that, to get started and see audit logs on your terminal, run it like this:

$ node main.js 2>&1 | npx pino-pretty

If you want to see all the built in restify tracing:

$ node main.js -vv 2>&1 | npx pino-pretty

By default, this program writes to a directory in /tmp, but you can override with a -d option. Additionally, by default it does not require authentication, but you can require that with:

$ node main.js -u admin -z secret 2>&1 | npx pino-pretty

Lastly, re: the 2>&1 | npx pino-pretty bit. In production, you assuredly would not want to pipe to the pino-pretty CLI, but rather capture the audit records in their raw form, so they would be easy to post process and perform analytics on. Like all UNIX programs should, this example writes "informational" messages to stderr, and audit records to stdout. It's up to you to redirect them as appropriate.

Let's get the full magilla (i.e., with auth) running:

$ node main.js -u admin -z secret 2>&1 | npx pino-pretty

Also, before we go any further, install the json tool as all the examples below use that.

$ curl -isS http://127.0.0.1:8080 | json
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/todo
Content-Length: 127
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:05:05 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

[
  "GET     /",
  "POST    /todo",
  "GET     /todo",
  "DELETE  /todo",
  "PUT     /todo/:name",
  "GET     /todo/:name",
  "DELETE  /todo/:name"
]

$ curl -isS http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo | json
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/todo
Content-Length: 2
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:07:05 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

[]

$ curl -isS http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo -X POST -d name=demo -d task="buy milk"
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/todo
Content-Length: 8
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:08:04 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

buy milk

Aha! Note that here the content-type was application/foo because our server set the q-val highest for that, and curl sets the accept header to */*.

$ curl -isS http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo | json
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/todo
Content-Length: 8
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:09:45 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

[
  "demo"
]

Note here our server was setup to use streaming, and we explicitly opted for JSON:

$ curl -isS http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo/demo | json
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:11:19 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

{
  "name": "demo",
  "task": "buy milk"
}

However, we still supported the full negotiation via another means:

$ curl -isS -H accept:application/todo http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo/demo
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/todo
Content-Length: 8
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:14:31 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

buy milk

$ curl -isS -X DELETE http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo/demo
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:15:50 GMT
Connection: keep-alive