Nap

Nap is an extremely simple REST client for Ruby. It was built to quickly fire off HTTP requests without having to research net/http internals.

gem 'nap'
require 'rest'
require 'json'

response = REST.get('http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json', {},
  {:username => '_evan', :password => 'buttonscat'}
)
if response.ok?
  timeline = JSON.parse(response.body)
  puts(timeline.map do |item|
    "#{item['user']['name']}\n\n#{item['text']}"
  end.join("\n\n--\n\n"))
elsif response.forbidden?
  puts "Are you sure you're `_evan' and your password is the name of your cat?"
else
  puts "Something went wrong (#{response.status_code})"
  puts response.body
end

If you need more control over the Net::HTTP request you can pass a block to all of the request methods.

response = REST.get('http://google.com') do |http_request|
  http_request.open_timeout = 15
  http_request.set_debug_output(STDERR)
end

To enable the proxy settings in Nap, you can either use the HTTP_PROXY or http_proxy enviroment variable.

$ env HTTP_PROXY=http://rob:secret@192.167.1.254:665 ruby app.rb

Nap defines one top-level and three main error types which allow you to catch a whole range of exceptions thrown by underlying protocol implementations.

• REST::Error: Any type of error
• REST::Error::Timeout: Read timeouts of various sorts
• REST::Error::Connection: Connection errors caused by dropped sockets
• REST::Error::Protocol: Request failed because of a problem when handling the HTTP request or response

In the most basic case you can rescue from the top-level type to warn about fetching problems.

begin
  REST.get('http://example.com/pigeons/12')
rescue REST::Error
  puts "[!] Failed to fetch Pigeon number 12."
end

Nap couldn't be the shining beacon in the eternal darkness without help from:

• Eloy Durán
• Joshua Sierles
• Thijs van der Vossen

For all other great human beings, please visit the GitHub contributors page.

• REST::Request now allows all HTTP verbs to send a body entity.

• Removed REST::DisconnectedError, please use REST::Error::Connection instead.