Laravel Fake API

Create placeholder API endpoints from a simple PHP array.

LFA utilizes Faker for dummy data.

Inspired by JSON Server.

Installation

To install LFA, run the following composer command:

composer require andyabih/laravel-fake-api --dev

Next, publish the config file to fill in your endpoints & responses:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Andyabih\LaravelFakeApi\LaravelFakeApiServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Configuration

Below is a sample laravel-fake-api.php config file:

<?php

return [
    'base_endpoint' => '/api/fake',

    'endpoints' => [
        'posts' => [
            '_settings' => [
                'identifiable' => 'slug',
                'auth'         => true,
                'paginate'     => 5,
            ],
            
            'id'       => 'random_digit_not_null',
            'title'    => 'word',
            'slug'     => 'word',
            'text'     => 'paragraph|2',
            'category' => '_categories'
        ],

        'categories' => [
            'id'    => 'random_digit_not_null',
            'name'  => 'word',
            'image' => 'image_url'
        ],
    ]
];

Base endpoint

LFA registers the /api/fake/ prefix for all endpoints, you can change that by changing the base_endpoint entry in the configuration file.

Endpoints

Inside the endpoints array, you can create all your different endpoints. The example above contains two: /posts and /categories (/api/fake/posts for full).

Fields

For each endpoint, you can then specify all the fields you want the response to contain. We've defined 5 here: id, title, slug, text, and category. The values for these fields are Faker methods. Make sure you snake case them (ie: randomDigit becomes random_digit), and any additional argument you want to pass should be separated with a pipe; so "text" => 'paragraph|2' translates to paragraph(2).

In case you want to show a foreign entity inside the endpoint response, you can prefix it with an underscore. A plural key will return an array of multiple entities, and a singular one would return only one (ie: "categories" => "_categories" will return an array of categories, but "category" => "_category" will only return a single entry).

If you are requesting multiple relationship entities, you can also pass in an optional argument specifying the amount of results you want, so you can do something like "categories" => "_categories|5" which will return 5 categories.

Endpoint settings

A reserved _setting key is used to specify any additional settings to the endpoint. Currently, only 3 settings are available: identifiable, paginate, and auth.

Identifiable

The identifiable option will determine what column name is used to identify specific entries. The default value for the identifiable setting is id, meaning a GET call to /api/fake/categories/1 will check against the id field. In the above example, posts are identified by their slug, so you will need to access them using something like /api/fake/posts/post-slug-here.

Paginate

Straightforward here. If you are expecting multiple results, you can paginate the response by enabling the paginate option (which is by default false), and specify the amount of entries you want per page (so 5 in the example).

Auth

LFA also offers a 'fake' authentication layer. If enabled (it's false by default), you will receive a 401 unauthorized error if you do not call the endpoint with an Authorization header. No further checks are done on the token, it just checks if the header exists.

Filters

_count

You can pass in the query parameter _count to specify the number of results you want. Calling /api/fake/categories?_count=5 will return 5 categories.

_without

You can use the _without parameter to specify which columns you want to exclude. /api/fake/posts?_without=title will return posts without the title field.

_only

Same logic as _without, but this time you specify which columns you want to include. /api/fake/posts?_only=title will only return the title field for the posts.

_no_relationships

You can specify that you want to ignore all embedded relationships with the _no_relationships parameter. /api/fake/posts?_no_relationships=1 will not return the category entity inside the response.

Column name

You can also pass in a column name with a value to filter by value. /api/fake/posts?slug=slug-1 will only return entries where the slug field is equal to slug-1. Also works with relationships, so you can do something like /api/fake/posts?categories__id=1, the format for this is entityName__fieldName.

Preset responses

LFA checks for a laravel-fake-api.json file in the root of your Laravel project. If available, LFA will combine both the randomized dummy data & the preset responses in your JSON file.

A sample JSON file for the above configuration could be something like:

{
    "categories": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "name": "Category 1",
            "image": "https://google.com/image.jpg"
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "name": "Category 2",
            "image": "https://google.com/image.jpg"
        },
        {
            "id": 3,
            "name": "Category 3",
            "image": "https://google.com/image.jpg"
        }
    ]
}