sandman is a RESTful API service provider for legacy (existing) databases. Why is that useful? Imagine you're working for AnonymousCorp and need to access Group Y's data, which is presented to you through some horrible API or GUI. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just interact with that database through a REST API?
More than that, imagine if you could interact with the database through a REST
API and no one had to write any code. No boilerplate ORM code, no database
connection logic. Nothing. Sandman can be run as a command-line tool
(sandmanctl) that just takes your database information as parameters, then
auto-magically connects to your it, introspects the schema, generates a REST
API, and starts the server.
Install sandman using pip: $ pip install sandman. This provides the script
sandmanctl, which just takes the database URI string, described here. For example, to connect to a SQLite database in the same directory you're running the script, you would run:
$ sandmanctl sqlite+pysqlite:///database_file_nameTo connect to a PostgreSQL database, make sure you install a driver like
psycopg2 using pip, then use the following connection string:
$ sandmanctl postgresql+psycopg2://scott:tiger@localhost/mydatabaseAgain, see the SQLAlchemy documentation for a more comprehensive discussion of connection strings.
sandman supports all databases that the underlying ORM, SQLAlchemy, supports. Presently, that includes:
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL Server
- SQLite
- Sybase
- Drizzle
- Firebird
Third-party packages extend support to:
- IBM DB2
- Amazon Redshift
- SQL Anywhere
- MonetDB
The RESTful API service comes with the following features:
- Proper support for all HTTP methods