api2html

On the fly HTML generator from API data

API2HTML is a web server that renders Mustache templates and injects them your API data. This allows you to build websites by just declaring the API sources and writing the template view.

How does it work?

To create pages that feed from a backend you just need to add in the configuration file the URL patterns the server will listen to. Let's imagine we want to offer URLs like /products/13-inches-laptops where the second part is a variable that will be sent to the API:

...
"pages":[
{
    "name": "products",
    "URLPattern": "/products/:category",
    "BackendURLPattern": "http://api.company.com/products/:category",
    "Template": "products_list",
    "CacheTTL": "3600s",
    "extra": {
        "promo":"Black Friday"
    }
},
...

The Template setting will look for the file tmpl/products_list.mustache and the response of the BackendURLPattern call will be injected in the variable data. An example of how you could use it:

<h1>Products for sale</h1>
<p>Take advantage of the {{extra.promo}}!</p>
<table>
    {{#data}}
        <tr>
            <td>{{name}}</td>
            <td>{{price}}</td>
        </tr>
    {{/data}}

    {{^data}}
       <tr>
            <td colspan="2">There are no products in this category</td>
        </tr>
    {{/data}}
</table>

You probably guessed it already, but in this scenario the backend would be returning a response like this:

// http://api.company.com/products/13-inches-laptops
{
    [
        { "name": "13-inch MacBook Air", "price": "$999.00" },
        { "name": "Lenovo ThinkPad 13", "price": "$752.00" },
        { "name": "Dell XPS13", "price": "$925.00" }
    ]
}

Install

When you install api2html for the first time you need to download the dependencies, automatically managed by dep. Install it with:

$ make prepare

Once all dependencies are installed just run:

$ make

Run

Once you have successfully compiled API2HTML in your platform the binary api2html will exist in the folder. Execute it as follows:

$ ./api2html -h
Template Render As A Service

Usage:
  api2html [command]

Available Commands:
  generate    Generate the final api2html templates.
  serve       Run the api2html server.

Use "api2html [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Run the engine

$ ./api2html run -h
Run the api2html server.

Usage:
  api2html serve [flags]

Aliases:
  serve, run, server, start

Examples:
api2html serve -d -c config.json -p 8080

Flags:
  -c, --config string   Path to the configuration filename (default "config.json")
  -d, --devel           Enable the devel
  -p, --port int        Listen port (default 8080)

Generator

The generator allows you to create multiple mustache files using templating. That's right create templates with templates!

$ ./api2html generate -h
Generate the final api2html templates.

Usage:
  api2html generate [flags]

Aliases:
  generate, create, new


Examples:
api2html generate -d -c config.json

Flags:
  -i, --iso string    (comma-separated) iso code of the site to create (default "*")
  -p, --path string   Base path for the generation (default ".")
  -r, --reg string    regex filtering the sources to move to the output folder (default "ignore")

Hot template reload

$ curl -X PUT -F "file=@/path/to/tmpl.mustache" -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" \
http://localhost:8080/template/<TEMPLATE_NAME>

Building and running with Docker

To build the project with Docker:

$ make docker

And run it as follows:

$ docker run -it --rm -p8080:8080 -v $PWD/config.json:/etc/api2html/config.json api2html -d -c /etc/api2html/config.json