pied-piper

Transparent, aggressive API cache/proxy.

Pied piper is a tool to alleviate the pain of working with slow APIs. It can:

• store API responses in a database and retrieve them,
  instead of trying to fetch it from the API itself.
• dump server responses so you can edit or review them
• respond with fake data for different requests

It uses no etags and tries to be as transparent as possible,
but it is a high level tool, meant to work with JSON requests/responses.

The name comes from the folk tale Rat-Catcher of Hamelin,
this tool has nothing to do with tv series or startups.

usage

Instead of calling your http://foo.bar.dev:8080/api/,
you have to change the api url in your frontend code to be something
like http://localhost:3100/myproject/proxy (myproject can be
a name of your session, project or anything, this will be the collection
id in the database and it will group requests together).

runtime configuration

• recording:true - toggle recording of responses into db
• strict:false - match and record in/from db with request body (otherwise record/match with request method
  and request uri only); not really recommended with arbitrary user data, but it’s up to you.
• active:true - if inactive, all the requests will be forwarded to the remote api
• dump:true - save responses into dump directory
• sleep:0 - sleep in sec (to sleep on a certain response only, use fakes’ generator response)
• disabledProjects:[] - array of strings, same as active, but on a per project basis

See default values,
api interface

env vars example

{
  "env": {
    "LOG_LEVEL": "silly",
    "NODE_ENV": "development",
    "TARGET": "http://dev.foo.bar.local/api",
    "MONGODB_URI": "mongodb://localhost:27017/piedpiper",
    "HTTPS_KEY": "local.key",
    "HTTPS_CERT": "local.crt"
  }
}

API documentation

• all api related docs are in README.md files under their appropriate routes
• concatenated md
• rendered html

https support

So far the server can run on https (supply both the cert and the key through env vars),
but https target endpoints are not supported. I will add support, if I need it.

TODO

• rezip gzipped responses