OpenBridge is a universal API runtime engine designed to connect, transform, and orchestrate multiple APIs through a single, unified interface. It acts as a middleware layer that can route requests to diverse backends, apply data transformations, aggregate responses, and expose a consistent API surface for clients. With OpenBridge, you can define endpoints that proxy to external services, apply request shaping and filtering, cache results, and implement custom logic or orchestrations across heterogeneous APIs. This makes it ideal for building federated data services, API gateways, or integration layers that expose a cohesive API to downstream clients.

To use OpenBridge, start the server using the provided command and access its API endpoints as defined in your configuration. The runtime typically supports configuring routes and behaviors via a configuration file or inline definitions, enabling you to map incoming requests to one or more target APIs, specify transformation hooks, and control error handling and retries. Depending on your deployment, you can scale the bridge by running multiple instances behind a load balancer and adjusting environment variables for port, authentication, and per-endpoint behavior.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js (LTS version) installed on your system
• npm or yarn
• Git (optional, for cloning the repository)

Install steps:

1. Clone the repository (or download the release): git clone https://github.com/nomagicln/open-bridge.git cd open-bridge

2. Install dependencies: npm install

   or

   yarn install

3. Configure environment (optional but recommended):

   • PORT: Port to run the server (default 3000)
   • OPEN_BRIDGE_CONFIG: Path to your configuration file (optional if defaults are provided)

4. Run the server: npm start

   or if using a direct node command as in mcp_config

   node src/server.js

5. Verify the server is running by hitting the base URL (e.g., http://localhost:3000/health) and testing a defined endpoint.

6. (Optional) Build or package for deployment according to your environment (Docker, systemd, or process manager).

Environment variables to consider: PORT, OPEN_BRIDGE_CONFIG, LOG_LEVEL, and AUTH_TOKEN if you enable protected endpoints. Common issues include port conflicts, missing configuration files, or dependency mismatches after upgrades. If you encounter connection errors to downstream APIs, verify network access, API keys, and rate limits. Refer to the project’s README for endpoint definitions and transformation hooks, and ensure that your deployment environment (Docker, PM2, systemd) is configured to restart the service on failure. When scaling, load balancers should preserve session affinity if the bridge relies on per-request state, or otherwise ensure stateless configurations across instances.