Easy CRUD backend development with Zod and codehooks-crudlify

Imagine you are building a frontend-app and need a way to persist data. You have a pretty good idea of what the data looks like (the schema). Creating CRUD REST APIs built on top of a database is not super-complex, but still requires a lot of setup and plumbing. This takes time and it’s not fun. What about using services like http://restdb.io and http://airtable.com? That is certainly an option, but what if you need some custom JavaScript code as well?

Zod and codehooks-crudlify comes to the rescue!

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. Zod is developer friendly and a perfect fit for defining data schemas for REST API CRUD backends.

Crudlify automagically creates a NoSQL backend from any data schema (Zod, Yup, JSON-schema), complete with secure REST APIs, logic middleware and much more. Crudlify is an open source library developed by codehooks.io.

Code example

The following code example shows a simple CRUD backend app with a single data schema for user. We use Typescript in this example, but JavaScript works just as fine.

// index.ts
import { app } from 'codehooks-js' // Standard Codehooks.io lib
import { crudlify } from 'codehooks-crudlify';
import { z }  from "zod";

const User = z.object({
  username: z.string(),
  email: z.string().email(),
  status: z.boolean().default(true)
}).required({username: true, email: true});

crudlify(app, {user: User})

export default app.init(); // Bind functions to the serverless cloud

Install and deploy

First create a project directory for the source code.

mkdir mycrud
cd mycrud
touch index.ts

Copy the source code from the example above into the index.ts file.

Tip: add source code control with git init.

Install dependent packages including Zod.

npm init es6
npm install codehooks -g
npm install codehooks-js codehooks-crudlify zod

Then install the Codehooks CLI for easy deployment to the cloud.

npm install codehooks -g

You may be required to sudo the command for sufficient access rights.

Create a cloud project for your CRUD backend application. The coho init command also creates an example index.js example file, just remove this file.

coho init

rm index.js

Finally deploy the app to the serverless cloud.

coho deploy

Test the deployed CRUD app endpoint.

Tip: Use Postman or Thunder for easy API testing.

We use curl for this simple test of the CRUD backend REST API.

POST a new User

Use the coho info --examples command to view your API endpoint address and secure API tokens. For example, in this example the endpoint address is https://mycrud-0sbn.api.codehooks.io.

curl --location --request POST 'https://mycrud-0sbn.api.codehooks.io/dev/user' \
--header 'x-apikey: a75186df-3880-48ba-a9ed-1e98a6d76d8e' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "username": "Joe",
    "email": "[e-mail]"   
}'

GET users

After a successfull POST to the REST API we can query the API for data.

curl --location --request GET 'https://mycrud-0sbn.api.codehooks.io/dev/user?username=Joe' \
--header 'x-apikey: a75186df-3880-48ba-a9ed-1e98a6d76d8e' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json'

Result

[
    {
        "username": "Joe",
        "email": "[e-mail]",
        "status": true,
        "_id": "186caaac119-tiry33nf09dvuj"
    }
]

Testing that Zod validates the data schema

Let's POST a JSON document with an invalid email address and see what happens.

curl --location --request POST 'https://mycrud-0sbn.api.codehooks.io/dev/user' \
--header 'x-apikey: a75186df-3880-48ba-a9ed-1e98a6d76d8e' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "username": "Jane",
    "email": "jane.example.com"   
}'

Result from Zod shows that it's working as expected.

[
    {
        "validation": "email",
        "code": "invalid_string",
        "message": "Invalid email",
        "path": [
            "email"
        ]
    }
]

Conclusion

Validation libraries are useful for more than just validation. They are schemas, and as such they can describe a REST CRUD API - something "codehooks-crudlify" have shown us. If you are eager to get this set up but want to run it locally, you can use a regular Node.js Express server and a MongoDB database with the NPM package codehooks-mongodb.

Happy coding!