Create full-fledged APIs for slowly moving datasets without writing a single line of code.
Create full-fledged APIs for slowly moving datasets without writing a single line of code.
ROAPI automatically spins up read-only APIs for static datasets without requiring you to write a single line of code. It builds on top of Apache Arrow and Datafusion. The core of its design can be boiled down to the following:
See below for a high level diagram:
# if you are using homebrew
brew install roapi
# or if you prefer pip
pip install roapi
Check out Github release page for pre-built binaries for each platform. Pre-built docker images are also available at ghcr.io/roapi/roapi.
cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/roapi/roapi --branch main --bins roapi
Spin up APIs for test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv and
test_data/spacex_launches.json:
roapi \
--table "uk_cities=test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv" \
--table "test_data/spacex_launches.json"
Or using docker:
docker run -t --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/roapi/roapi:latest --addr-http 0.0.0.0:8080 \
--table "uk_cities=test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv" \
--table "test_data/spacex_launches.json"
Query data using the builtin web UI at http://localhost:8080/ui:
Query data using SQL, GraphQL or REST via curl:
curl -X POST -d "SELECT city, lat, lng FROM uk_cities LIMIT 2" localhost:8080/api/sql
curl -X POST -d "query { uk_cities(limit: 2) {city, lat, lng} }" localhost:8080/api/graphql
curl "localhost:8080/api/tables/uk_cities?columns=city,lat,lng&limit=2"
Get inferred schema for all tables:
curl 'localhost:8080/api/schema'
For MySQL and SQLite, specify the table argument like below:
--table "table_name=mysql://username:password@localhost:3306/database"
--table "table_name=sqlite://path/to/database"
Want dynamic register data? Add parameter -d to command. --table parameter cannot be ignored for now.
roapi \
--table "uk_cities=test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv" \
-d
Then post config to /api/table register data.
curl -X POST http://172.24.16.1:8080/api/table \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '[
{
"tableName": "uk_cities2",
"uri": "./test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv"
},
{
"tableName": "table_name",
"uri": "sqlite://path/to/database"
}
]'
For windows, full scheme(file:// or filesystem://) must filled, and use double quote(") instead of single quote(') to escape windows cmdline limit:
roapi \
--table "uk_cities=file://d:/path/to/uk_cities_with_headers.csv" \
--table "file://d:/path/to/test_data/spacex_launches.json"
You can also configure multiple table sources using YAML or Toml config, which supports more advanced format specific table options:
…
To run serve tables using config file:
roapi -c ./roapi.yml # or .toml
See config documentation for more options including using Google spreadsheet as a table source.
By default, ROAPI encodes responses in JSON format, but you can request
different encodings by specifying the ACCEPT header:
curl -X POST \
-H 'ACCEPT: application/vnd.apache.arrow.stream' \
-d "SELECT launch_library_id FROM spacex_launches WHERE launch_library_id IS NOT NULL" \
localhost:8080/api/sql
You can query tables through REST API by sending GET requests to
/api/tables/{table_name}. Query operators are specified as query params.
REST query frontend currently supports the following query operators:
To sort column col1 in ascending order and col2 in descending order, set
query param to: sort=col1,-col2.
To find all rows with col1 equal to string 'foo', set query param to:
filter[col1]='foo'. You can also do basic comparisons with filters, for
example predicate 0 <= col2 < 5 can be expressed as
filter[col2]gte=0&filter[col2]lt=5.
To query tables using GraphQL, send the query through POST request to
/api/graphql endpoint.
GraphQL query frontend supports the same set of operators supported by REST query frontend. Here how is you can apply various operators in a query:
{
table_name(
filter: { col1: false, col2: { gteq: 4, lt: 1000 } }
sort: [{ field: "col2", order: "desc" }, { field: "col3" }]
limit: 100
) {
col1
col2
col3
}
}
To query tables using a subset of standard SQL, send the query through POST
request to /api/sql endpoint. This is the only query interface that supports
table joins.
You can pick two columns from a table to use a key and value to create a quick keyvalue store API by adding the following lines to the config:
kvstores:
- name: "launch_name"
uri: "test_data/spacex_launches.json"
key: id
value: name
Key value lookup can be done through simple HTTP GET requests:
curl -v localhost:8080/api/kv/launch_name/600f9a8d8f798e2a4d5f979e
Starlink-21 (v1.0)%
ROAPI can present itself as a Postgres server so users can use Postgres clients to issue SQL queries.
$ psql -h 127.0.0.1
psql (12.10 (Ubuntu 12.10-0ubuntu0.20.04.1), server 13)
WARNING: psql major version 12, server major version 13.
Some psql features might not work.
Type "help" for help.
houqp=> select count(*) from uk_cities;
COUNT(UInt8(1))
-----------------
37
(1 row)
Query layer:
Response serialization:
application/jsonapplication/vnd.apache.arrow.streamapplication/vnd.apache.parquetData layer:
Misc:
The core of ROAPI, including query front-ends and data layer, lives in the self-contained columnq crate. It takes queries and outputs Arrow record batches. Data sources will also be loaded and stored in memory as Arrow record batches.
The roapi crate wraps
columnq with a multi-protocol query layer. It serializes Arrow record batches
produced by columnq into different formats based on client request.
To log all FlightSQL requests in console, set RUST_LOG=tower_http=trace.
docker build --rm -t ghcr.io/roapi/roapi:latest .
ms-vscode-remote.remote-containersOnce done you will see prompt from left side to reopen the project in dev container or open command palette and search for open with remote container:
apt-get update && apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y cmake
username: user
password: user
database: test
once done create table so you can map it in -t arg or consider using sample in .devcontainer/db-migration.sql to populate some tables with data
cargo run --bin roapi --features database -- -a localhost:8080 -t posts=mysql://user:user@db:3306/test
otherwise if you are looking for other features
you have to select appropriate one from roapi/Cargo.toml
RUSTSEC-2026-0235: Insufficient archive validation can cause out-of-bounds reads in archives containing Rc/Arc
RUSTSEC-2026-0195: Unbounded namespace-declaration allocation in `NsReader` enables memory-exhaustion denial of service
RUSTSEC-2026-0194: Quadratic run time when checking a start tag for duplicate attribute names
RUSTSEC-2026-0195: Unbounded namespace-declaration allocation in `NsReader` enables memory-exhaustion denial of service
RUSTSEC-2026-0194: Quadratic run time when checking a start tag for duplicate attribute names
RUSTSEC-2026-0192: `ttf-parser` is unmaintained
RUSTSEC-2026-0173: proc-macro-error2 is unmaintained
MongoDB support
ROAPI + Postgres FDW
Feature Request: Support JWT for authorizations