Accessing configuration settings with a RESTful API?

Question

I'm designing a front-end to modify the settings of the web application I'm developing. The settings are stored like so:

{
    "site_title": "My Web Site",
    "site_description_long": "Welcome to My Web Site! Lots of welcome text here!",
    "site_description_short": "It's my site"
}

I'm very new to REST APIs so I'm not sure how to proceed. It's not like every other resource like Users and Posts where there are many objects. There is only one Settings object with unlimited numbers of keys and values. Is it bad practice for /settings to return a single object? Is it bad practice to access it by name and just return a string like /settings/site_title? Would that even be necessary when the client can just cache the entire settings object client-side?

Answer 1

One option would be to treat each setting like its own resource.

GET /settings/
{
    settings: [
        { "id":"site_title" , "value":"My Web Site" },
        { "id":"site_description_short" , "value":"It's my site" },
    ]
}

GET /settings/site_title
{
    "id":"site_title", 
     "value":"My Web Site"
}

This approach is RESTful, but will lead to a lot of server hits. I think using a single object as you describe is not unreasonable, although if you have 500 settings it can become painful to deal with.