Faker REST API

[RayyanNafees]

Inspiration: JSON-Placeholder

How about a faker REST api much like that of json-placeholder to get fake data

fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1')

Faker Example

In a similar way faker can also implement a REST API by using the library's methods as REST endpoints

For example, the following fakerjs code

faker.git.branch() // 'feed-parse'

will return the same data as fetching the endpoint:

fetch('https://fakerjs.vercel.app/git/branch')

[ST-DDT]

Thanks for your suggestions, what would be your intended usecase?
IMO a generic web service cannot produce the data that I would need for my services.

Do you know of a web server provider that would affordably host this service for an OSS project?

Or are you referring to having a template project to host such an API?

[matthewmayer]

I'm not sure this really needs to be part of the official @faker-js distribution. It's pretty trivial to make a basic web server using your preferred programming language. For example here's an toy implementation in 12 lines using Express:

const express = require('express');
const {faker} = require('@faker-js/faker');
const app = express();
const port = 8888;
app.get('/:module/:method', (req, res) => {
    try {
        res.json(faker[req.params.module][req.params.method]());
    } catch (err) {
        res.status(500).json({error: "Not a valid method call"});
    }
})
app.listen(port, () => console.log(`Listening on port ${port}`));

But to go from this to a full implementation would require a lot of decisions about the structure of the API which are likely to be implementation-specific, as well as figuring out lots of things about hosting.

• how would you request multiple values?
• how would you set a seed/handle reproducible results?
• how would you pass parameters?
• could you pass a template like with faker.helpers.fake?
• how do you handle errors?
• do you need rate-limiting?
• do you need api keys?
• how do you prevent abuse of the service?
• who pays for hosting?
• what domain name to use?
• do you need server monitoring?
• how do you handle versioning of the underlying Faker library?

Realistically most use-cases are much better served by either using the NPM package locally (much faster) or setting up your own server which returns data in the format you need.

[sanjaykhanssk]

you can checkout fakend.fyi