Awesome REST

A collaborative list of great resources about RESTful API architecture, development, test, and performance. Feel free to contribute to this on-going list.

• Design
  • Guidelines
• Standards
• Clients
  • PHP
  • Client-side JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • Ruby
  • Go
  • .Net
  • Generators
• Servers
  • Directly On Top Of A RMDB
  • Node.js
  • PHP
  • Symfony2
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Go
  • Java
  • Haskell
• Testing
  • Querying
  • Mocking
  • Public REST APIs To Use In Tests
• Documentation
• API Gateway
• SaaS Tools
• Miscellaneous

Design

• Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures - Roy Fielding's dissertation defining REST
• HTTP API design guide extracted from work on the Heroku Platform API
• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
• How to design a REST API? - Full guide tackling security, pagination, filtering, versioning, partial answers, CORS, etc.
• Richardson Maturity Model - Explained by Martin Fowler, originally presented by Leonard Richardson at the QCon 2008.
• Enterprise Integration Using REST - Discusses the constraints and flexibility that you have with nonpublic APIs, and lessons learned from doing large scale RESTful integration across multiple teams.
• HATEOAS - Clear explanation on what HATEOAS is, and why you should use it.
• How to GET a cup of coffee
• REST API Tutorial - RestApiTutorial.com is dedicated to tracking REST API best practices and making resources available to enable quick reference and self education for the development crafts-person.
• API-Security-Checklist - Best practices about REST API security

Guidelines

• Adidas REST API Guidelines - Adidas REST API Guidelines define standards and guidelines for building REST APIs at adidas.
• Atlassian REST API design guidelines version 1 - This document provides guidelines to Atlassian developers who are designing REST APIs for Atlassian applications.
• Cisco REST API Guide - Guidelines for designing REST APIs at Cisco.
• Google Cloud API design guide - Guidelines Google follows when designing Cloud APIs and other Google APIs (REST APIs and gRPC APIs).
• Haufe API Style Guide - Guidelines created by Haufe-Lexware CTO team.
• Microsoft REST API Guidelines - The Microsoft REST API Guidelines, as a design principle, encourages application developers to have resources accessible to them via a RESTful HTTP interface.
• Restful API Guidelines by Zalando - Developing Restful APIs: A Comprehensive Set of Guidelines.

Standards

• JSON API - Standard for building APIs in JSON.
• RAML - Simple and succinct way to describe RESTful API.
• JSend - Simple specification that lays down some rules for how JSON responses from web servers should be formatted.
• OData - Open protocol to allow the creation and consumption of queryable and interoperable RESTful APIs. Quite complex.
• HAL - Simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API.
• JSON-LD - Standard for describing Linked Data and hypermedia relations in JSON (W3C).
• Hydra - Vocabulary for Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs (W3C).
• Schema.org - Collection of schemas describing common data models.
• OpenAPI - Formerly known as the Swagger Specification, OpenAPI specifcation is the world’s most popular description format for defining Restful APIs.

Clients

PHP Clients

• Guzzle - HTTP client and framework for consuming RESTful web services.
• Buzz - Another lightweight HTTP client.
• unirest for PHP - Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library.

JavaScript Clients

• restangular - AngularJS service to handle REST API properly and easily.
• restful.js - JS client for interacting with server-side RESTful resources.
• traverson - A Hypermedia API/HATEOAS Client for Node.js and the Browser
• raml-client-generator - Generates static client libs for js.

Node.js Clients

• restler - REST client library for node.js.
• unirest for Node.js - Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library.

Ruby Clients

• RESTClient - Simple HTTP and REST client for Ruby, inspired by microframework syntax for specifying actions.
• Spyke - Interact with REST services in an ActiveRecord-like manner.
• excon - Usable, fast, simple Ruby HTTP 1.1. It works great as a general HTTP(s) client and is particularly well suited to usage in API clients.
• httparty - Makes HTTP fun again!
• Net::HTTP - Net::HTTP provides a rich library which can be used to build HTTP user-agents.
• raml-ruby-client-generator - Auto generate API client from a RAML file.

Go Clients

• gopencils - Small and simple package to easily consume REST APIs.
• resty - Simple HTTP and REST client for Go inspired by Ruby rest-client.

.NET Clients

• RestSharp - Simple REST and HTTP API client for .NET
• Refit - The automatic type-safe REST library for Xamarin and .NET
• Flurl - Fluent, portable, testable REST/HTTP client library
• RestEase - Easy-to-use typesafe REST API client library, which is simple and customisable. Heavily inspired by Refit
• Tiny.RestClient - Simpliest Fluent REST client for .NET.
• RestLess - The automatic type-safe-reflectionless REST API client library for .Net Standard.
• Apizr - Refit-based web api client, but resilient (retry, connectivity, cache, auth, log, priority, etc...).

Generators

• openapi-generator - OpenAPI Generator allows generation of API client libraries (SDK generation), server stubs, documentation and configuration automatically given an OpenAPI Spec (v2, v3).

Servers

Directly On Top Of A RMDB

• postgrest - Serve a fully RESTful API directly from an existing PostgreSQL database.
• MySQL HTTP plugin - Simple REST-like / CRUD server for any MySQL database.
• pREST - A fully RESTful API from any existing PostgreSQL database written in Go.

Node.js

• node-restify - Framework specifically meant for REST API.
• Sails.js - Node.js Web framework embedding a command to generate automatically a REST API.
• mers - Express service exposing Mongoose finders as RESTful API.
• Baucis - Build scalable REST API based on your Mongoose entities.
• flatiron/resourceful - Isomorphic Resource engine for JavaScript.
• loopback - Powerful Node.js framework for creating APIs and easily connecting to backend data sources.
• Feathers - is a real-time, micro-service web framework that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.
• Expressa - Express middleware for creating APIs from JSON schemas with a simple admin editor and permissions model.
• rest-hapi - Generate RESTful API based on mongoose models that supports relational data.
• Nestjsx/crud - Generate CRUD controllers and services for RESTful API with NestJS and TypeORM.

PHP

• Microrest - Micro-web application providing a REST API on top of any relational database.
• Negotiation - Content negotiation library.
• Drest - Library for exposing Doctrine entities as REST resource endpoints.
• Restler - Lightweight framework to expose PHP methods as RESTful web API.
• HAL - Hypertext Application Language (HAL) builder library.
• Apigility - API builder built with Zend Framework 2.
• phprest - Specialized REST microframework for PHP.
• Hateoas - PHP library to support implementing representations for HATEOAS REST web services.
• Fusio - Open source API management platform.

Symfony2

• REST APIs with Symfony2: the Right Way - Complete guide to build a state-of-the-art REST API with Symfony2 framework.
• FOSRestBundle - Bundle handling view, routing, error handling, etc. for your REST API.
• stanlemon/rest-bundle - Build a REST API based on Doctrine entities using conventions over configuration.
• lakion/Lionframe - Glu between several community libraries to ease API development.
• BazingaHateoasBundle - Integrate the Hateoas library into a Symfony2 application.
• Symfony REST Edition - Start with a Symfony2 application with all REST-friendly bundles pre-configured.
• NgAdminGeneratorBundle - Boostrap ng-admin configuration based on stanlemon/rest-bundle.
• DunglasApiBundle - Build a REST API which follow Hydra/JSON-LD specification.
• API Platform - Specialize Symfony edition for the creation of hypermedia REST APIs.
• NelmioApiDocBundle - Generate documentation for your REST API from annotations.

PowerShell

• Pode - Pode is an cross-platform, open-source, community-supported web server and REST API framework for PowerShell developers

Python

• Django REST framework - Powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.
• django-tastypie - Creating delicious APIs for Django apps.
• flask-restful - Extension for Flask that adds support for quickly building REST APIs.
• flask-restless - Flask extension for generating ReSTful APIs for database models defined with SQLAlchemy (or Flask-SQLAlchemy).
• sandman - Automated REST APIs for existing database-driven systems.
• restless - Framework agnostic REST framework based on lessons learned from TastyPie.
• Python Eve - Eve is an open source Python REST API framework designed for human beings. It allows to effortlessly build and deploy highly customizable, fully featured RESTful Web Services.
• Ramses - Makes RAML files executable by generating production-ready APIs from them at runtime.
• Flask-Potion - Flask-Potion is a powerful Flask extension for building RESTful JSON APIs. It also provides several Clients for easier access to the API.
• apistar - A smart Web API framework, designed for Python 3.
• Falcon - Falcon is a bare-metal Python web API framework for building high-performance microservices, app backends, and higher-level frameworks.
• FastAPI - FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints. With automatic API documentation using Swagger UI and ReDoc, based on OpenAPI and JSON Schema.

Ruby

• Grape - Opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.
• Rails - RailsGuides: Using Rails for API-only applications.

Go

• gocrud: Go library to simplify creating, updating and deleting arbitrary depth structured data — to make building REST services fast and easy.
• go-json-rest - Thin layer on top of net/http that helps building RESTful APIs easily.
• sleepy - RESTful micro-framework written in Go.
• restit - Go micro framework to help writing RESTful API integration test.
• go-relax - Framework of pluggable components to build RESTful API's.
• go-rest - Small and evil REST framework for Go.