November helps you generate a simple Node.js API tailored for Ember.js apps, with the help of Express and Sequelize.

Installation

$ npm install -g november-cli

Get started

$ november new my-app

This will create a new project with the following structure:

├── app
│   ├── actions
│   ├── controllers
│   ├── middleware
│   ├── models
│   ├── router.js
│
├── config
│   ├── config.json
│
├── lib
├── migrations
├── node_modules
├── public
├── server.js
├── test

By default, MySQL is used as a database, but you can use any relational database supported by Sequelize by changing the values in config/config.json.

To run the app, run npm start (or just nodemon if you have it installed) in your app’s directory and visit localhost:9000.

In your Ember.js app

Make sure you change the host in your Ember.js adapter file so that it can communicate with November:

# In your ember project folder
$ ember generate adapter

// app/adapters/application.js
import DS from "ember-data";

export default DS.RESTAdapter.reopen({ 
  host: 'http://localhost:9000'
});

Models

$ november generate model user

This generates:

• A model file (app/models/user.js) for the user, which will determine the structure of the database table
• Routes in app/router.js for creating, reading, updating and deleting users (based on the conventions of Ember Data). Feel free to remove the actions you don't need.
• Controller files, which hook up the routes to database actions:
  • app/controllers/user/add.js
  • app/controllers/user/list.js
  • app/controllers/user/load.js
  • app/controllers/user/update.js
  • app/controllers/user/remove.js

With the app and your local database running in the background, visit localhost:9000/users, and you should see:

{
  "users": []
}

The table users has automatically been created in your database.

Actions

Actions are for API endpoints which are not specifically tied to any model.

$ november generate action login

This generates:

• An action file (app/actions/login.js)
• A route in app/router.js (POST by default)

Render()

The render()-method in your controllers is used for rendering both your models and your error messages. It takes a single argument.

Rendering models

If you pass a valid sequelize model to render(), it will generate that model according to the JSON API conventions used by Ember Data.

The most basic usage:

render(<your-sequelize-model>);

...which can also be typed like this:

render({
  model: <your-sequelize-model> 
});

returns:

{
  "user": {
    <...>
  }
}

If your sequelize model includes associated models, they are sideloaded by default:

{
  "user": {
    <...>
    "tweets": [1, 5]
  },
  "tweets": [
    <...>
  ]
}

However, you can also specify if you want some (or all) associations to be embedded instead.

Here we specify that we want the tweets-association to be embedded. If we wanted all associations to be embedded, we would set embedded: true

render({
  model: <your-sequelize-model>,
  embedded: ['tweets']
});

... which returns:

{
  "user": {
    <...>
    "tweets": [
      {
        id: 1,
        <...>
      },
      {
        id: 5,
        <...>
      }
    ]
  }
}

Rendering errors

Controllers generated by November rely heavily on promises. If they catch an error, they call render(error).

Let's say we accidentally search for a field (name) which doesn't exist in our database table:

// app/controllers/user/list.js
req.models.user
.findAll({
  where: {
    name: "Bob"
  }
})
.then(function(users) {
  // Not gonna happen
})
.catch(function(err) {
  render(err);
});

An error will be catched and render(err) will return this JSON to the client:

{
  "error": {
    "code": 500,
    "message": "Could not load users"
  }
}

... while still showing a more descriptive error to the developer in the console so that you can locate the problem:

You can also render your own exceptions to the user, by throwing a string with the error message or an array where the first element is the error code and the second is the error message:

// app/controllers/user/update.js
req.models.user.find({
  where: {
    username: req.params.username
  }
})
.then(function(user) {
  if (user.id !== req.user) {
    throw [403, "You are not allowed to edit this user!"]
  }
  return user.save();
})
.then(function(user) {
  // Not gonna happen
})
.catch(function(err) {
  render(err);
});

...what the client will see:

{
  "error": {
    "code": 403,
    "message": "You are not allowed to edit this user!"
  }
}

Todos

TDD is not really my thing, but it would be nice to get some automatic Mocha tests when you generate new models. :)

Contact

If you have any questions, feel free to ping me on Twitter or just open an issue!