// the find
typicode/json-server
Get a full fake REST API with zero coding in less than 30 seconds (seriously)
json-server spins up a REST API from a JSON file in seconds — no server code, no database, just a file and a command. It's been the go-to tool for frontend developers who need a backend to work against before the real one exists. 75k stars is a fair reflection of how often that situation comes up.
The query API punches above its weight for a mock server — field-level operators (gt, lt, contains, startsWith), multi-field sorting, and cursor-style pagination with total counts all work out of the box. JSON5 support is a small but appreciated touch that makes the data file less tedious to maintain by hand. The embed feature handles one level of relational data without any configuration, which covers the majority of UI prototyping cases. The codebase is small, TypeScript throughout, and the test coverage is solid for the core service and query parsing.
The v1 branch is still in beta with explicit breaking-change warnings in the README, so anyone picking this up today has to decide between the stable-but-dated v0.17 and the current-but-unstable v1 — not a great position for a tool that's supposed to just work. There's no authentication simulation at all: if your real API uses JWTs or cookies, you can't test any of that surface. Write operations persist to the JSON file on disk which means concurrent processes or file watchers can corrupt state. The `_where` JSON-in-querystring approach is awkward to construct and URL-encode by hand, and it'll confuse anyone who tries to build it from a form.