Interfake updates from 1.10 to 1.12

Good news, everyone! Interfake 1.12 is now available on npm. If you’re not familiar with Interfake already, I recommend checking out the Interfake GitHub repository. If you’re an existing user, head over to your repo and do this:

npm install interfake --save

This is the first blog post I’ve written in a while about Interfake so this could be a good opportunity to go over some features which have been released over the last few months.

Proxy Support

This is my favourite new feature so I’ll do this first. If you need a local API to proxy a remote API for some reason (e.g. for a CORS workaround) then Interfake now will allow you to do that. Not just that, though - Interfake will also allow you to specify headers to send along with your request to the proxied endpoint - maybe you want to save on having to specify them over and over elsewhere, or you need to add Authentication to the requests? That’s what this is for.

A simple example:

var Interfake = require('interfake');
var interfake = new Interfake();
interfake.get('/interfake-tags').proxy({
	url: 'https://api.github.com/repos/basicallydan/interfake/tags'
});
interfake.listen(3000);

And specifying headers:

var Interfake = require('interfake');
var interfake = new Interfake();
interfake.get('/interfake-tags').proxy({
	url: 'https://api.github.com/repos/basicallydan/interfake/tags',
	headers: {
		'User-Agent': 'Interfake Proxy Whoop',
		'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.full+json',
		'Authorization': 'Basic notmyusername:notmypassword'
	}
});
interfake.listen(3000);

In both examples, Interfake will make a request behind-the-scenes to the URL you specify, and the response it gets back it will forward on. Any headers specified in the proxy function will be sent as request headers.

I can see this being very useful in the future!

PATCH support

A good REST API open includes support for the PATCH HTTP method. The purpose of this method is represent a partial change to an existing resource. As an example, let’s look at an instance of a resource called Kingdom located on a fictional API at /kingdoms/5. Below is the response to a GET /kingdoms/5 request.

{
	"id" : 5,
	"name" : "Candy Kingdom",
	"monarch" : "Princess Bubblegum",
	"population" : 10000,
	"hero" : "Finn the Human"
}

If we wanted to modify the hero property of this resource but leave all else untouched, a very suitable HTTP method to do this with would be the PATCH method, sending { "hero" : "Jake the Dog" } to PATCH /kingdoms/5. This would probably return a 200 or whatever - but that’s not important right now. The important thing is how to implement this kind of functionality using Interfake. We do this using extends, like so:

var Interfake = require('interfake');
var interfake = new Interfake();
interfake.get('/kingdoms/5').body({
	'id' : 5,
	'name' : 'Candy Kingdom',
	'monarch' : 'Princess Bubblegum',
	'population' : 10000,
	'hero' : 'Finn the Human'
});
interfake.patch('/kingdoms/5').extends.get('/kingdoms/5').body({
	'hero' : 'Jake the Dog'
});
interfake.listen(3000);

There! Simple! Now, when we make a PATCH request to /kingdoms/5, the body of GET /kingdoms/5 will change slightly. REST to your heart’s content.

Config Reload

If you’re using the command-line interface to Interfake, and loading a file of Interfake requests using interfake --file myRequests.json or something like that, then you can now use the --watch or simply -w flag to make sure that whenever your file is modified, the endpoints will be reloaded with the new config.

This is particularly helpful if you’re in a situation where you’re trying to spec out an API quickly, and don’t want to have to keep quitting and restarting Interfake.

That’s all for now. Thanks should go to everybody who has opened issues and pull requests over the last few months. Interfake is looking really good now - it’s come from being a pretty useful tool to being a really useful tool in a short time. There’s still more to do though, and I’d be grateful to anybody who can take the time to create a pull request or open an issue.

As a side note, I’d like to encourage readers of this blog to check out a newer project of mine, Forkability. It’s the type of project which could really thrive with contribution from a lot of people with a wide range of skills, since it’s a linting tool for open-source projects across all different languages. The goal is to encourage better open-source development and leadership by making it easy for people to learn about how well they’re already doing. Check it out at https://basicallydan.github.io/forkability, and the source is available at https://github.com/basicallydan/forkability. Thanks!

Heckle me on Twitter @basicallydan.