Unrestful

REST is not fit for all use cases. Most of RPC frameworks are too heavy and complicated and require a lot of Ops involvement.

Unrestful is a lightweight simple RPC framework for Rails that can sit next to your existing application. It supports the following:

• Simple procedure calls over HTTP
• Streaming
• Async jobs and async job log streaming and status tracking

Unrestful requires Rails 5.2 (can work with earlier versions) and Redis. In development environments, Unrestful requires a multi-threaded web server like Puma. (it won't work with Webrick).

Mount Unrestful on your Rails app:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  # ...
  mount Unrestful::Engine => "/mount/path"
  # ...
end

This will add the following paths to your application:

/mount/path/rpc/:service/:method
/mount/path/jobs/status/:job_id
/mount/path/jobs/live/:job_id

You can start your Rails app as normal.

Unrestful looks for files under app/models/rpc to find the RPC method. Any class should be derived from ::Unrestful::RpcController to be considered. Here is an example:

require 'unrestful'

module Rpc
	class Account < ::Unrestful::RpcController
		include Unrestful::JwtSecured
		scopes({
			'switch_owner' => ['write:account'],
			'migrate' => ['read:account'],
			'long_one' => ['read:account']
		})
		live(['migrate'])
		async(['long_one'])

		before_method :authenticate_request!
		#after_method :do_something

		def switch_owner(from:, to:)
			foo = ::AcmeFoo.new
			foo.from = from
			foo.to = to

			return foo
		end

		def migrate(repeat:)
			repeat.to_i.times {
				write "hello\n"
				sleep 1
			}

			return nil
		end

		def long_one
			return { not_done_yet: true }
		end

	end
end

NOTE: All parameters on all RPC methods should be named.

POST or GET parameters will be used to call the RPC method using their names. For example, { "from": "you", "to": "me" } as a HTTP POST payload on rpc/account/switch_owner will be used to call the method with the corresponding parameters.

NOTE: Both rpc/accounts and rpc/account are accepted.

The three methods in the example above, support the 3 types of RPC calls Unrestful supports:

Sync calls are called and return a value within the same HTTP session. switch_owner is an example of that. Any returned value will be wrapped in Unrestful::Response and sent to the client (this could be a SuccessResponse or FailResponse if there is an exception).

Live calls are calls that hold the client and send live logs of progress down the wire. They might be cancelled mid-flow if the client disconnects. Live methods should be named in the live class method and can use the write method to send live information back to the client.

Async calls are like sync calls, but return a job id which can be used to track the background job's progress and perhaps follow its logs. Use the jobs/status and jobs/live end points for those purposes. Async calls should be named in the async class method and can use @job (Unrestful::AsyncJob) to update job status or publish logs for the clients.

Most of the code for Unrestful is in 2 controllers: Unrestful::EndpointsController and Unrestful::JobsController. Most fo your questions will be answered by looking at those 2 methods!

By default Unrestful doesn't impose any authentication or authorization on the callers. However it comes with a prewritten JWT authorizer which can be used by using include Unrestful::JwtSecured in your own RPCController. This will look for a JWT on the header, will validate it and return the appropriate response.

The simplest way to use Unrestful with JWT is to use a tool like Auth0. Create you API and App and use it to generate and use the tokens when making calls to Unrestful.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'unrestful'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install unrestful

Contribution directions go here.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License.