Ruby-Resty is a ruby port of Resty, which provides a simple way to interact with RESTful services. Ruby-Resty was ported to be shell agnostic and for easier community development.

The resty REPL is built on top of Pry to leverage Custom Commands, history management, an interactive help system, and most importantly, using plain old Ruby.

gem install ruby-resty

• Ruby 1.9.3
• Ruby 2.0.0

To get started, you can enter the REPL by providing the host option.

ruby-resty --host http://nyan.cat

If you would like headers to be attached with every request, you can do so:

ruby-resty --host http://nyan.cat --headers X-NYAN-CAT-SECRET-KEY:nyan_nyan X-NYAN-TYPE:octo

HTTP Basic Authentication can be attached to the hostname

ruby-resty --host http://nyan.cat --username Leeroy --password Jenkins

The REPL accepts the following options that are attached to each request. This provides an easier way to make multiple requests without having to specify headers everytime.

--alias, -a    : The per-host entry to use in ~/.ruby_resty.yml
--headers, -H  : The headers attached to each request. Ex: X-NYAN-CAT-SECRET-KEY:nyan_nyan
--host, -h     : The hostname of the REST service. Ex: http://nyan.cat
--list-aliases, -l:   List aliases in ~/.ruby_resty.yml
--username, -u : HTTP basic authentication username
--password, -p : HTTP basic authentication password
--verbose, -v  : Verbose mode
--version, -e  : Print verison and exit

Requests can be sent to services by specifying a path and any associated JSON data. The following methods are supported:

GET     [path]
PUT     [path] [data]
POST    [path] [data]
PATH    [path] [data]
HEAD    [path]
DELETE  [path]
OPTIONS [path]
TRACE   [path]

For example you might want to send a GET request, which doesn't require a body:

resty> GET /api/cats/1
{ 
  "nyan_cat": { 
    "name": "octo"
    "color": "green"
  }
}

Or you can send a POST request, which does require a body:

resty> POST /api/cats {"nyan_cat": {"name": "oliver", "color": "blue"} }
{ 
  "nyan_cat": { 
    "name": "oliver"
    "color": "blue"
  }
}

Ruby hashes are also accepted:

resty> POST /api/cats {nyan_cat: {name: "oliver", color: "blue"} }

As are ruby variables:

resty> data = {nyan_cat: {name: "oliver", color: "blue"} }
resty> POST /api/cats data

Headers sent with individual requests are supported:

resty> GET /api/cats/1 -H filter:tail-length -H filter:name

After a request is returned, the resulting JSON response is parsed into a ruby hash and stored in response:

resty> POST /api/cats {nyan_cat: {name: "oliver", color: "blue"} }
resty> response
{ 
  "nyan_cat" => { 
    "name" => "oliver"
    "color" => "blue"
  }
}

Since the response object is a ruby hash, the values can be changed and sent on another request:

resty> response
{ 
  "nyan_cat" => { 
    "name" => "oliver"
    "color" => "blue"
  }
}
resty> response["nyan_cat"]["name"] = "grumpy"
resty> PUT /api/cats response

Including options from the command-line can get tedious, especially if you specify different options to different hosts. The ~/.ruby_resty.yml config file allows per-host configuration.

To get started, you can call a generator:

rake copy_config

This will copy ~/.ruby_resty.yml which allows you to specify options related to specific hosts.

nyan:
  host: http://nyan.cat
  headers:
    header_name: header_value
    header_name2: header_value2
  username: (optional)
  password: (optional)

Now instead of starting the REPL like:

ruby-resty --host http://nyan.cat --headers header_name=header_value header_name2=header_value2

You can omit the header information:

ruby-resty --alias nyan

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Don't forget to run the tests with rake

Copyright (c) 2013 Austen Ito

Ruby-Resty is released under the MIT License