Liberty

Liberty is the state of being free from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority.

Liberty is also a minimalist web-framework for Ruby that seeks to get out of your way so that you can focus on your most valuable asset — the part of your application that is uniquely yours — your business logic.

Liberty is structured in a way that encourages you to separate your business logic from the underlying framework code. It provides a web adapter for a Hexagonal Architecture, and it works very well with Domain Driven Design.

Though Liberty does not shackle you to convention, we (the authors) do consider there to be some best practices:

First, we believe THE most important aspect of your software is your domain logic. As such, we believe you should start there, and spend the vast majority of your time working on that code. Tests can act as the front-end to drive your domain logic, and mock repositories can act as your data store. This allows you to develop your business logic in isolation.

Second, we believe your application should look uniquely yours inside an editor. Accounting programs should not look like social networks. And, neither should look like a game. As such, we encourage you to put your business logic in an obvious place that is separate and apart from the framework concepts. (We typically use a domain folder in which we have folders for each Bounded Context.)

Third, we believe the code that ties your application to physical infrastructure, like the web or a database or a messaging system, should be stored somewhere else. (We typically use an app folder for this code, with folders for endpoints, concrete repositories, and other bits of glue code.)

A small application for managing to-do lists might look like this:

todo/
  app/
    endpoints/
    repositories/
  domain/
    todos/
    users/

The /app folder contains the code that glues the domain logic to the outside world. While the domain folder contains the DDD Bounded Contexts within the application.

That said, Liberty does not use convention. It relies on classes declaratively registering themselves at load time to handle a specific use case or web request. The router dispatches requests to the appropriate endpoint (in lightning speed, we might add). And, a dispatcher calls the appropriate use case when needed.

Liberty consists of four top level classes:

• Endpoint
• CORS
• Application (private)
• Router (private)

Inherit from the Endpoint class to create class that responds to a single type of request. Here's an example for an HTTP get to the /hello route, which returns a hello world JSON payload.

class MyEndpoint < Liberty::Endpoint
  responds_to :get, '/hello'

  def status
    200
  end

  def json
    { hello: :world }
  end
end

Using responds_to as in the example above registers a class to receive traffic on that route with our incredibly fast Router. You shouldn't ever need to use the Router directly. Just use responds_to to register your route.

The Application class is another private class that turns each Endpoint class into a Rack application. This is also a class you won't use directly.

Finally, the CORS class allows you to configure CORS headers for your application, like this:

Liberty::CORS.config do |config|
  config.headers = {
    'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' => '*',
    'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' => 'POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS',
    'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' => 'Origin, Content-Type, Accept, Authorization, X-Your-Own-Custom-Headers',
    'Access-Control-Max-Age' => '1728000'
  }
end

If you configure your CORS headers before you launch your application, Endpoints will automatically respond with the right headers.

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add liberty

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install liberty

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/first-try-software/liberty. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Liberty project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.