OpenAPI is a specification that lets you write a document which describes a REST API. From this document, you can generate documentation, generate stubs to call into your API in a variety of languages, and automatically validate requests on the server, and much more. Swagger is a set of tools that work with OpenAPI. This will walk through setting up an OpenAPI document for a typical MongoDB/Express/Node.js app.

This is the first of a three part series.

Swagger Libraries for Node.js

The state of Swagger/OpenAPI in Node.js is a bit of a mess. First, you’ll probably notice that the OpenAPI 3.0 spec has been released, but as of this writing no Node.js tools support it. The most popular tool-chain for implementing your Swagger API server side is swagger-tools, however this project has officially been deprecated in favor of sway and sway-connect. sway-connect has only had five commits, and the most recent of those was two years ago. So far no versions of sway-connect have been published on npm.

sway hasn’t seen a release in 2 years either, although it forms the basis of swagger-node-runner. This is the project that’s being pushed by swagger.io. There’s a CLI tool called swagger which will generate a project for you (although the project it generates is using a sadly out of date version of swagger-node-runner).

So for this article, we’re going to use swagger-node-runner directly, and ignore the swagger npm project. Note that if you’re not using express, swagger-node-runner also has support for many other popular frameworks, including connect, hapi, restify, and sails.

Babel Project

The code for this entire project is available on github. The version for this specific article is this commit, but you can check out the latest master if you’re the kind of person who likes to skip to the end of a good book. ;)

There are lots of different ways to set up a project using Babel. Our project is going to have a fairly simple .babelrc using “babel-preset-env” to compile everything to be compatible with Node.js v4.x and up. If you’re using Node.js v8.x or higher, you should edit the .babelrc to compile to your version, as this will leave async functions alone, which makes stepping through the code in a debugger much more pleasant. Also note on older versions of node.js, babel-polyfill is required, but it can be removed on Node.js v8.x or higher.

We store our source files in /src, and the babel compiled versions end up in /lib.

I like to run my unit tests directly from the /src folder, using babel-register to compile source files on the fly. This means you don’t need to rebuild your whole project to run a test. This requires a little care when configuring swagger-node-runner, as we need to tell it to load controllers from /src during tests, but /lib in production. The sample project does it by “lying” to swagger-node-runner about the root folder of the app, claiming to be running from the /src or /lib folder depending on which folder config.js is being loaded from.

Our Swagger API

We’re going to start with a really simple API. We want to send a request like this one:

http://localhost:10010/api/v1/user?id=54f0be26ae8aba260b8f6db7

and we want to get back a User object from MongoDB. (We’re not actually going to have a MongoDB instance in the background, as we’re just interested in the Swagger part of this.) Our swagger definition can be found here.

The interesting part for now is the ‘/user’ path:

paths:
  /user:
    # This will be handled by src/api/controllers/user.js
    x-swagger-router-controller: user
    get:
      description: Gets a User.
      # This will be handled by the `getUser()` funciton in src/api/controllers/user.js.
      operationId: getUser
      parameters:
        - name: id
          in: query
          description: The ID of the user to get.
          required: true
          type: string
          format: ObjectId

The x-swagger-router-controller tells swagger-node-runner which source file the “controller” for this path is in.

You’ll also note that we’ve specified there is one required parameter “id”, which is a “string” in “ObjectId” format. MongoDB uses 24 digit hex numbers as IDs. If you’re familiar with OpenAPI, you’ll know that “ObjectId” is not one of the standard formats provided by OpenAPI. We’re going to do some custom validation here; more on that in our next article.

Also note that at the top of this swagger.yaml file, we specified a basePath of /api/v1. This means the URL for this route is actually /api/v1/user, even though it’s listed as /user here. The basePath gets appended to the start of every path.

Writing a Controller

Here’s our very simple controller, found in src/swagger/controllers/user.js:

// src/swagger/controllers/user.js

// This is a controller.

export function getUser(req, res) {
    // variables defined in the Swagger document can be referenced using
    // req.swagger.params.{parameter_name}
    const id = req.swagger.params.id.value;

    // This sends back a JSON response.  In a real application we'd
    // go to mongodb or some other application logic here.
    res.json({
        id,
        username: 'jwalton'
    });
}

This just returns back a fake “user” object. Note that the return value of the controller is ignored. If you throw an exception, it will be propagated back to the client (although maybe not in a pretty JSON format like you’d expect), but if you try to return a Promise and that Promise rejects, you’ll just have an unhandled Promise rejection and your client will never get a response.

Configuring swagger-node-runner

Ok, now we have a definition of our API, and we have a controller which implements this API. We need an express middleware which glues these together, and takes care of routing, validating incoming requests to make sure they match the schema defined in the definition, and calling into our controller. This is where swagger-node-runner comes in.

swagger-node-runner uses the config module to load it’s configuration from /config/default.yaml in the root of your project. If you’re already using config, you can just add a swagger entry to your config file. If you’re not using config, you can just pass all the configuration directly to swaggerNodeRunner.create:

// Stop swaggerNodeRunner from complaining about the lack of a config file.
process.env.SUPPRESS_NO_CONFIG_WARNING = 'true';

swaggerNodeRunner.create({
    appRoot: path.resolve(__dirname, '..'),
    swagger: path.resolve(__dirname, '../api/swagger/swagger.yaml'),
    fittingsDirs: ['lib/api/fittings'],
    ...
}, done);

(Edit: I’ve just discovered that swagger-node-runner calls config in “strict mode”, which means that if you run your app with NODE_ENV=production, config will produce a warning because ‘production.yaml’ doesn’t exist. A better solution might be to make a ‘swagger’ folder in your project, and tell swaggerNodeRunner that this swagger folder is your “appRoot”. Then you can either create ‘swagger/config/default.yaml’ and friends and put your configuration there, or you can create empty files to appease config.)

At a minimum, the call to swaggerNodeRunner.create() needs to contain appRoot, the path to the root of your source tree. swagger-node-runner uses this to resolve /config/default.yaml, and also other paths in the configuration (but, weirdly, not the swagger definition file, so make sure you path.resolve() it as shown above). Also note that if you want to specify the path to your swagger.yaml file, you must pass it directly to swaggerNodeRunner.create() - it will not be loaded from default.yaml.

You can find documenation for all the options in the configuration here. Note that in the latest version of swagger-node-runner, you need to add ‘swagger_params_parser’ to the bagpipes/swagger_controllers right after ‘cors’. If you generate a project with ‘swagger’ it won’t be there, and it’s not mentioned in any of the documentation. If you have problems with req.swagger.params not being defined in your controllers, it’s probably because you’re missing this.

You can see the config for our project here.

By default, swagger-node-runner looks for a swagger definition file in ‘/api/swagger/swagger.yaml’, relative to your project root. You can move this to a different location, or even pass in a JSON object by passing in the
swagger option to swaggerNodeRunner.create(). (Although, as mentioned above, swagger-node-runner will resolve swagger to the current working directory, and not to the application root.) Leaving it in ‘/api/swagger/swagger.yaml’ has the advantage that you can run npx swagger project edit, and it will launch a nifty editor in a window where you can edit your OpenAPI document (although it will use an older version of the swagger editor.)

Note that ‘swagger-node-runner’ has no support for promises, so if you’re a fan of async/await, and you’re on Node.js 8, you can do:

import {promisify} from 'util';

// swagger-node-runner doens't support promises, so use promisify here.
const createSwaggerNodeRunner = promisify(swaggerNodeRunner.create).bind(swaggerNodeRunner);

If you’re on an older version of Node.js, util.promisify() doesn’t exist, but you can use the promise-breaker library to do basically the same:

import pb from 'promise-breaker';

export async function makeServer() {
    ...

    const swaggerRunner = await pb.call(done =>
        swaggerNodeRunner.create(swaggerConfig, done)
    );

    ...
}

Creating the runner and integrating it with express looks like:

    const swaggerConfig = {
        appRoot: path.resolve(__dirname, '..')
    };

    // Create a swagger middleware
    const swaggerRunner = await pb.call(done =>
        swaggerNodeRunner.create(swaggerConfig, done)
    );
    const swaggerExpress = swaggerRunner.expressMiddleware();

    // Note this line is equivalent to `app.use(swaggerExpress.middleware);`
    swaggerExpress.register(app);

(A minor bug as of this writing: in swagger-node-runner@0.7.3, after writing the message body, swagger-node-runner will call next() to pass control to the next express route, which means if you have any other routes that match the URL, they will be run. See #87 for details and a workaround, and PR #125.)

The swaggerRunner instance has some useful properties;

  • swaggerRunner.api is the Sway instance which powers the swaggerRunner.
  • swaggerRunner.bagpipes is the bagpipes instance.

Wait… bagpipes?

How Does This All Work?

Ok, if you’ve followed along to this point, you have now seen all the code required to make this thing fly. You can give it a try by running npm start, and pointing a browser at http://localhost:10010/api/v1/user?id=54f0be26ae8aba260b8f6db7, and you should get back a JSON reply like:

{"id":"54f0be26ae8aba260b8f6db7","username":"jwalton"}

We already saw that the swagger.yaml file defines our API, and defines the controller to call to run the API. So swagger-node-runner is providing a middleware that, for any route defined in the swagger.yaml file, will call into the appropriate controller and run the appropriate function.

If you have a look at the configuration for swagger-node-runner, you’ll see where we define the directory to find the controllers, and where to find mocks. But… what’s all this about bagpipes and fittings? What does Scottish music have to do with any of this?

bagpipes is a library that is, in many ways, similar to express; a “fitting” is like an express middleware function. A “pipe” is a list of fittings that get called, in order.

So you’ll notice that in the swagger-node-runner config, there’s a “swaggerControllerPipe” set to “swagger_controllers”, and then if you look down in the “bagpipes” section you’ll find a “swagger_controllers”, which contains a list of “fittings” to run. All of these fittings are “built in” fittings, that come with swagger-node-runner. You can write your own fittings and add them into this chain as well, for example, to do customized authentication or authorization. In the next part of this series, we’ll show a simplified example fitting which does custom validation.

You’ll also notice there’s a route called “/swagger” defined in swagger.yml. Going to /api/v1/swagger will return the JSON for the API specification.

  # This makes it so you can get the swagger file from /api/v1/swagger.
  /swagger:
    x-swagger-pipe: swagger_raw

“x-swagger-pipe” here tells swagger-node-runner to use the custom “swagger_raw” pipe defined in the swagger-node-runner config.

Next steps

In the next parts of this article, we’ll talk about:

  • Adding custom validation
  • Steps to make this production ready