pgrest

WARNING: This is work in progress. The APIs will remain in flux until 1.0.0. Suggestions welcome!

PgREST is...

• a JSON document store
• running inside PostgreSQL
• working with existing relational data
• capable of loading Node.js modules
• compatible with MongoLab's REST API
• and Firebase's real-time API!

Want to learn more? Check out our homepage at pgre.st and the wiki.

Installation

PostgreSQL 9.0 is required; we recommend using 9.2 or later, and nodejs 0.10.x.

You need to install the plv8js extension for PostgreSQL. If you're on OS X, Postgres.app comes with it pre-installed. Otherwise, see Installation for details.

After you install, create the plv8 extension

psql -U <user> -c "create extension plv8"

If you got error message Reason: image not found

Please download the version after version 9.2.4.3

PostgresApp release notes

Once the extension is installed, simply use npm to install pgrest:

% npm i -g pgrest

When installing from git checkout, make sure you do npm i before npm i -g .

Trying pgrest:

% psql test
test=# CREATE TABLE foo (_id int, info json, tags text[]);
CREATE TABLE
test=# INSERT INTO foo VALUES (1, '{"f1":1,"f2":true,"f3":"Hi I''m \"Daisy\""}', '{foo,bar}');
INSERT 0 1

% pgrest --db test
Serving `test` on http://127.0.0.1:3000/collections

You can now access foo content at http://127.0.0.1:3000/collections/foo

Reading:

curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/collections/foo/1

curl -g 'http://127.0.0.1:3000/collections/foo?q={"_id":1}'
curl -g 'http://127.0.0.1:3000/collections/foo?q={"tags":{"$contains":"foo"}}'

The parameter is similar to MongoLab's REST API for listing documents.

Note that if you use curl, you should probably use -g to prevent curl from expanding {}.

Writing:

echo '{"_id": 5,"info": {"counter":5} }' | curl -D - -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X POST -d @- http://localhost:3000/collections/foo

Developing

Runing tests:

createdb test
export TESTDBUSERNAME=postgres # optional
export TESTDBNAME=test
npm i
npm run test

Additional web server support

In addition to the bundled pgrest frontend, you can also use the following frontend:

• Perl: Plack::App::PgREST
• Using ngx_postgres (experimental)