HAL Explorer

With HAL Explorer you can browse and explore HAL and HAL-FORMS based RESTful Hypermedia APIs. HAL Explorer was inspired by Mike Kelly’s HAL-Browser. HAL Explorer also supports Spring Profiles.

Documentation, Demos & Cloud Deployment

Here you find the documentation for the latest release and the current snapshot, as well as a demo (with examples) of the latest release and the current snapshot:

Release	1.2.1	Reference Documentation	HAL Explorer Demo
Snapshot	1.2.2-SNAPSHOT	Reference Documentation	HAL Explorer Demo

You also find current release at https://hal-explorer.com.

TL;DR

Features

• Responsive design

• Syntax highlighted response body

• Custom request headers

• Available Themes

  • Bootstrap 5 default theme

  • Bootswatch themes

  • Dark theme

• 2 layouts

  • 2 columns layout with optional documentation

  • 3 columns layout with documentation always visible if available

• API URL, theme, layout, and request headers stored as URL fragment

• Support for Spring Data Rest profiles to populate properties in request editor

• Support for HAL-FORMS templates

  • Template elements in response explorer (see screenshot)

  • Template properties in request editor

  • Options support in request editor

• HAL-FORMS property constraint validation in request editor

Demos with Spring based Backends

You can also play with the latest snapshot version of HAL Explorer in demos that provide backends implemented with Spring. I host these demos at Heroku, so please give them a bit of time to warm up (this might take up to 1 minute).

• For HAL: Chatty API (Spring Data REST Backend)

• For HAL-FORMS: Movies API (Spring HATEOAS Backend)

Development Server

Run yarn start for a dev server. Navigate to http://localhost:4200/. The app will automatically reload if you change any of the source files. The development server has a build-in proxy configuration so that all calls to /api are forwarded to localhost:8080/api. This is convenient when you want to test a local server without having to deal with CORS. If you run yarn startl, an additional file server is started with port 3000. In the test-data directory, you find some JSON examples. Try it out with the URL http://localhost:4200/#uri=http://localhost:3000/movies.hal-forms.json.

Build

Run yarn build to build the project in production mode. The build artifacts will be stored in the dist/ directory.

Gradle/Java Build Support

If you have Java installed, you can also build the project with Gradle. The Gradle build will install Node.js locally in the project directory. Run ./gradlew build to build the project in production mode. The build artifacts will be stored in the dist/ directory.

Integration in your Backends

If you want to use a released version of HAL Explorer in a Java-based project, you could define a dependency to the HAL Explorer WebJar.

Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
    <artifactId>hal-explorer</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.1</version>
</dependency>

Gradle:

implementation 'org.webjars:hal-explorer:1.2.1'

When you use the WebJar with Spring Boot, you can access the HAL Explorer at /webjars/hal-explorer/1.2.1/index.html. The easiest way to integrate the upstream version of HAL Explorer into your backend would be to clone this Git repo, do a production build and then copy the content of the dist folder to a location accessible by your backend server. When you use Spring Boot, a good location in your project’s source tree would be src/main/java/resources/static/hal-explorer.

Running Tests

• yarn test to run the unit test suite against your default browser.

• yarn test-headless to run the unit test suite against headless Chrome.

• yarn e2e to run the e2e test suite against your default browser.

• yarn e2e-headless to run the e2e test suite against headless Chrome.

Take a look at package.json for more test options.

License

MIT, see http://toedter.mit-license.org