Introduction

Most of the time as a front end developer, development of a prototype can be stalled due to lack of an actual API. This could be because the back end team maybe taking too much time to develop the endpoint your application is to consume. In this guide, you will learn how to create your own mock endpoints using a local JSON file and how to consume it using your application. This guide assumes that you have a basic understanding of APIs and at least beginner proficiency in working with JSON files. You should also be familiar with testing APIs with either CURL or Postman.

Suppose you are a budding front end developer at a dev house in your local tech community. You need to develop a proof of concept(PoC) of a Payroll System for a potential client. The client has only requested to see a page with a list of Employee, fetched from some API. To accelerate the development, you decide to develop a mock API.

The mock API endpoint could be /employees and the properties for each of the employee will consist of:

1. id - number that uniquely identifies the employee
2. first_name - the first name of the employee
3. last_name - the last name of the employee
4. email - the email address of the employee
5. gender - the gender of the employee
6. status - the status of the employee

Setup

To create the mock API, you are going to use a tool called JSON server. The tool is designed to help developers spin up REST APIs with CRUD functionalities very quickly.

You can start off by setting up your Node Js project. Create a directory called json-mock-api

mkdir json-mock-api

Navigate to your project's root directory.

cd json-mock-api

Create a package.json file. The file is used to define the project's metadata; from name of the project to the dependencies to commands to run tests and start the project. Below is a sample of its contents and paste it into your package.json file:

{
  "name": "json-mock-api",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "A simple JSON mock API",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

You can then proceed to add the dependency needed to create the mock API, json-server. This can be done by running the following command on the project's root directory.

npm install json-server --save

Creating the mock API

Your mock API will need a source for its data. You can go ahead and create an src folder. In the src folder, you can then create a db.json file. Your file structure should look something like this.

json-mock-api/    
    node_modules/
    src/   
    	db.json
    package.json

The db.json file will act like your data source. There you will define what data you would want to retrieve from your mock API. Here is where you define the sample employees, and their various details as discussed earlier. The first property employees on the JSON file is used to define the name of the endpoint .

{
  "employees": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Doe",
      "email": "johndoe@abc.com",
      "gender": "Male",
      "status": "Terminated"
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "first_name": "Jane",
      "last_name": "Doe",
      "email": "janedoe@abc.com",
      "gender": "Female",
      "status": "New"
    },
    {
      "id": 3,
      "first_name": "Alice",
      "last_name": "Doe",
      "email": "alicedoe@abc.com",
      "gender": "Female",
      "status": "Leaving"
    },
    {
      "id": 4,
      "first_name": "Bob",
      "last_name": "Doe",
      "email": "bobdoe@abc.com",
       "gender": "Male",
      "status": "Active"
    }
  ]
}

To start up your API, run the command below:

json-server --watch src/db.json

You should see be able to see your API running with an endpoint, http:/localhost:3000/employees

Testing the mock API

You can go ahead and test your newly created endpoint on any API testing tool like Postman or CURL.

To make a GET request for all the employees, run the command below.

curl http://localhost:3000/employees

The response should be as below. Note that it is an array with all the employees.

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "first_name": "John",
    "last_name": "Doe",
    "email": "johndoe@abc.com",
    "gender": "Male",
    "status": "Terminated"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "first_name": "Jane",
    "last_name": "Doe",
    "email": "janedoe@abc.com",
    "gender": "Female",
    "status": "New"
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "first_name": "Alice",
    "last_name": "Doe",
    "email": "alicedoe@abc.com",
    "gender": "Female",
    "status": "Leaving"
  },
  {
    "id": 4,
    "first_name": "Bob",
    "last_name": "Doe",
    "email": "bobdoe@abc.com",
     "gender": "Male",
    "status": "Active"
  }
]

To make a GET request for a specific employee, you append the id of the employee to the endpoint; /employees/4. You can then run the command as below.

curl http://localhost:3000/employees/4

The response should be as below. Note that it is an object with the specific employee details of the employee whose id is 4.

{
  "id": 4,
  "first_name": "Bob",
  "last_name": "Doe",
  "email": "bobdoe@abc.com",
  "gender": "Male",
  "status": "Active"
}

Conclusion

Well, there you have it a simple mock API to help accelerate development. In this guide, you only managed to do GET requests. You can also use json-server to develop endpoints with other methods like POST, PATCH, DELETE. In addition, you can also add filtering and pagination to your endpoints. Just have a look at the Json Server Documentation