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Introduction

Rest serves a fully RESTful API from any SQL database, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite are supported now, and databases that are wire compatible with PostgreSQL or MySQL, e.g. CockroachDB and TiDB should also work, more databases might be added in the future.

Motivation​

Rest came out as a side project when implementing a toy database like SQLite, the original idea was inspired by an interesting project PostgREST which "is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API". Golang has the database/sql package which provides a generic interface around SQL and there are many drivers available, so the idea of Rest is to implement a similar API server that serves a fully RESTful API from any SQL database.

Features​

  • Various SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite)
  • Fully RESTful API
  • Authentication and Authorization
  • Written in Golang with built-in concurrency and a robust standard library
    • net/http for the API server
    • database/sql for the generic SQL interface
    • encoding/json for json operations
    • a large ecosystem in database and cloud-native

Comparison with other tools​

PostgREST​

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API. It's the most similar tool to Rest, it binds to PostgreSQL to leverage powerful PG features, e.g. using PostgreSQL roles concept to provide authentication. Rest aims to serve API from any SQL database and the design principle is to support various SQL database features while using standard SQL tables for application logic.

The idea of Rest is inspired by PostgREST, and it's also a great alternative if you are using PostgreSQL now.

Headless CMS​

There are also projects called headless CMS like Hasura and Directus. They are very similar, both are written in Node.js, provide REST and GraphSQL interfaces from different databases, has sophisticated authorization mechanisms and UI for database management. Besides the open-source code, they also have companies that provide a cloud environment to help you run the server. While having more functions they are also more complicated to get started using, but they would be more suitable for non-technical users.

Rest aims to keep the usage as simple as possible to let users start a fully RESTFul API backend server in two minutes. There might be more features coming to Rest, but the design principle should always keep it simple and stupid.