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	1.2.2	Reference Documentation	HAL Explorer Demo
Snapshot	1.2.3-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

• 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

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>1.2.2</version>
</dependency>

Gradle:

implementation 'org.webjars:hal-explorer:1.2.2'

When you use the WebJar with Spring Boot, you can access the HAL Explorer at /webjars/hal-explorer/1.2.2/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