I’ve long thought that a simple REST layer sitting on top of a database, with some suitable access controls would be an ideal solution for many of the small projects I find myself tinkering with. Until recently I’d never quite found a solution that provided this, but then I came across postgrest.
Having some time to spend looking at it and the base of an idea that might be ideally suited to using it, I decided to install. Rather than install the binary, I cloned the repository so that I had access to the source. However, it’s written in Haskell, a language I had no experience with. So, how do I build it?
- Install haskell
$ sudo apt-get install haskell-platform
*NB As this uses postgresql you also need the development libraries for postgresql installed.
$ sudo apt-get install libpq-dev
*
- Build/setup the project?
Initially it wasn’t clear, but after some web searches I found the documentation for the cabal build tool that explained the standard method which led me to do this.
$ cabal sandbox init<br></br>
$ cabal install -j```
This took a while as the various packages were download and installed.
3. Run postgrest
$ .cabal-sandbox/bin/postgrest
Usage: postgrest (-d|--db-name NAME) [-P|--db-port PORT] (-U|--db-user ROLE)
[--db-pass PASS] [--db-host HOST] [-p|--port PORT]
(-a|--anonymous ROLE) [-s|--secure] [--db-pool COUNT]
[--v1schema NAME] [--jwt-secret SECRET]
PostgREST 0.2.10.1 / create a REST API to an existing Postgres database```
Available options:
-h,--help Show this help text
-d,--db-name NAME name of database
-P,--db-port PORT postgres server port (default: 5432)
-U,--db-user ROLE postgres authenticator role
--db-pass PASS password for authenticator role
--db-host HOST postgres server hostname (default: "localhost")
-p,--port PORT port number on which to run HTTP
server (default: 3000)
-a,--anonymous ROLE postgres role to use for non-authenticated requests
-s,--secure Redirect all requests to HTTPS
--db-pool COUNT Max connections in database pool (default: 10)
--v1schema NAME Schema to use for nonspecified version (or explicit
v1) (default: "1")
--jwt-secret SECRET Secret used to encrypt and decrypt JWT
tokens) (default: "secret")
Now I have it built, time to start playing around with using it 🙂