simple-crud-rest-server

A basic REST API to Create, Read, Update and Delete key-value pairs

Written in Go using minimal third-party libraries

Endpoints

• POST /api {"key1":"value1"} - create a new entry with key key1 and value value1
• PUT /api/key1 value2 - update existing entry with key key1 to have value value2
• GET /api/key1 - get the value of key key1
• DELETE /api/key1 - delete the value associated with key1
• GET /api/key1/history - get a history of events which have been issued for key key1

Running

• Clone this repo and run the server with go run main.go
  • The server will run on localhost:9080/
• Run the unit tests with go test
• Expected behaviour can be seen by reading the unit tests

Nuances

• The server will save the stored data in a simple JSON file - this will be created if it does not already exist and persists when the server is stopped
• DELETE requests delete the value not the key - this can be seen by then getting the history
  • You must call POST to create a new value or PUT to update a non-deleted value
  • Technically you could use a PUT request to set a value to be an empty string which would functionally be the same as a DELETE request
• There is currently no support for different users, any request can affect any key
  • A basic authentication system could be added, giving each user a separate namespace which only they could access
• Currently only string values are supported
  • While the data is stored as JSON it would be trivial to expand to supporting JSON objects and arrays
  • More complex data structures could be added as documented structs
• As a simple project this server has a few potential bottlenecks
  • Reading and writing the whole file on each request will quickly become slow, adding a database to store the data would solve this
  • Running the server in a container in Kubernetes could allow for easy scaling and redundancy, and a gateway of some kind could provide rate limiting as well as authentication