I wrote Buttless because Engine Room Apps often have to develop an iPhone app or web site without having the backend API or in place yet. This is pretty common when you’re back-end developers are not in the office, or if you’re waiting for your client’s team to get on to it!
With Buttless, you can do the following pretty quickly:
- Define an API (resources, methods, parameters) using a simple YAML file
- Define example JSON results that the API would send back
- Generate pretty HTML and PDF documents for that defined API, which include usage instructions with CURL
- Run a web server which creates a pretend backend for your API, so if you’re an iPhone developer you have something to code against instantly
Install the gem
gem install buttless
Then go to your usual code folder and type
buttless my-first-api
Congrats, you’ve just started defining your API, and will be soon able to generate docs and develop against it.
Now to learn how to work with your API.
- Make default method GET
- Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet.
- Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it.
- Fork the project.
- Start a feature/bugfix branch.
- Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
- Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
- Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.
Copyright © 2012 Tobin Harris. See LICENSE.txt for
further details.