nor-app — Hypermedia App Server

nor-app provides a HTTP interface in to a nor-nopg
database — which provides noSQL features in a
PostgreSQL database server.

Features

• Web based UI to maintain document types with JSON Schema
• Web interface to create, search, edit and delete documents
• Maintains a hypermedia JSON REST API for the data

See also

• nopg — Shell scripting CLI for nor-nopg

Requirements

• Ubuntu Linux LTS 14.04 (other Linux systems probably work, too)
• Node.js v4.4.
• PostgreSQL 9.3 Server, with extensions:
  • pvl8
  • uuid-ossp
  • tcn
  • moddatetime
• See other dependencies from the NPM registry

Development

• Trello board: https://trello.com/b/MHiSILez

Install

Installing globally

Install nor-nopg:

npm install -g nor-nopg

Install nor-app:

npm install -g nor-app

Creating a database

Create a PostgreSQL database with these extensions:

CREATE EXTENSION plv8;
CREATE EXTENSION "uuid-ossp";
CREATE EXTENSION tcn;
CREATE EXTENSION moddatetime;

Set your database configurations into a PGCONFIG environment variable:

export PGCONFIG='postgres://app:password@localhost/app'

Setting name and port

Name your application (default name is nor-app):

export APPNAME='myapp'

You can also change your application port (default port is 3000):

export PORT='8080'

Initializing NoPG

nor-nopg init

Start the server

nor-app start

Check the logs at ~/.nor-app/logs/myapp/.

If there’s any problems, just create an issue.

Create admin user

nor-app-useradd --email='demo@example.com'

Write down the password, you need it to login :)

Installing as a dependency

You may want to use nor-app as a dependency instead of a global command.

Create a directory for your project and initialize NPM there:

mkdir myapp
cd myapp
npm init
npm install --save nor-nopg
npm install --save nor-app

…then edit scripts section in your ./package.json to look like this:

{
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "init": "nor-nopg init",
    "start": "nor-app start",
    "stop": "nor-app stop"
  }
}

After that, you can initialize the NoPg database with a command
npm run init instead of nor-nopg init and start the server simply
with a command npm start and stop it npm stop.

After installation

Open your browser at http://localhost:3000 and login

… and design your database in the browser…

… and access REST interface from: http://localhost:3000/api/

Troubleshooting

If something doesn’t work, check log files at ~/.nor-app/logs/myapp/.

Testing API

We recommend using jsonview when working in Google Chrome.

Testing API with curl

We also have a curl wrapper ./tools/curl which makes it easier to work with our API.

Easiest way to get a cookie is from logged in session using Google Chrome’s inspector.

Copy the value of connect.sid:

npm config set nor-app:curl_cookie 'connect.sid=your-value-here'

Then you can use the api:

./tools/curl http://localhost:3000/api/