Project: nestful - The Ruby Toolbox

Nestful is a simple Ruby HTTP/REST client with a sane API.

Installation

sudo gem install nestful

Features

Simple API
JSON requests
Resource API
Proxy support
SSL support

API

GET request

Nestful.get 'http://example.com' #=> "body"

POST request

# url-encoded form POST
Nestful.post 'http://example.com', :foo => 'bar'

# JSON POST
Nestful.post 'http://example.com', {:foo => 'bar'}, :format => :json

Parameters

# You can also provide nestled params
Nestful.get 'http://example.com', :nestled => {:vars => 1}

Request

Request is the base class for making HTTP requests - everthing else is just an abstraction upon it.

Nestful::Request.new(url, options).execute #=> <Nestful::Response>

Valid Request options are:

headers (hash)
params (hash)
method (:get/:post/:put/:delete/:head)
proxy
user
password
auth_type (:basic/:bearer)
timeout
ssl_options

Requests are run via the execute method.

Endpoint

The Endpoint class provides a single object to work with restful services. The following example does a GET request to the URL; http://example.com/assets/1/

Nestful::Endpoint.new('http://example.com')['assets'][1].get #=> Nestful::Response

Resource

If you're building a binding for a REST API, then you should consider using the Resource class.

class Charge < Nestful::Resource
  endpoint 'https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges'
  options :auth_type => :bearer, :password => 'sk_bar'

  def self.all
    self.new(get)
  end

  def self.find(id)
    self.new(get(id))
  end

  def refund
    post(:refund)
  end
end

Charge.all #=> []
Charge.find('ch_bar').amount

Response

All HTTP responses are in the form of a Nestful::Response instance. This contains the raw HTTP response, body, headers and a few helper methods:

response = Nestful.get('http://www.google.com')
response.body #=> '<html>...'
response.headers #=> {'Content-Type' => 'text/html'}
response.status #=> 200

You can also access the decoded body if available, such as for JSON responses:

response = Nestful.get('http://api.stripe.com/v1/charges')
charges  = response.decoded

All calls are proxied to the decoded body, so you can access JSON properties like this:

charges = Nestful.get('http://api.stripe.com/v1/charges')['data']

Credits

Parts of the connection code were inspired from ActiveResource.