Ruby http client how to#
Ruby http client code#

Ruby http client how to#

Lcbo::Product: The actual details of a product we fetch.īefore we dive into the implementation, let’s take a look at how to use it: require_relative 'lib/lcbo'.

Lcbo::ProductResponse: Handles the HTTP response and knows how to build an Lcbo::Product.

Lcbo::ProductRequest: Handles the HTTP request for a given Product ID.

Lcbo::Products: The public interface we’ll be working with to fetch details about a specific product.

It provides a nice little interface to access information relating to the beverages and stores of the LCBO (the governmental corporation in Ontario, Canada, responsible for the retail and distribution of alcohol for the province). Let’s take a look at how we might do this for an API. Other programming shouldn’t need to be exposed to the specifics of the implementation, and that same implementation should be able to be changed/refactored without the need to change the public API. It’s best to provide some sort of interface for interacting with these API endpoints or services and hiding all of the lower-level HTTP request and response details. In the next section, we’ll be working through an example with the HTTP library and how we can encapsulate and organize our code. I won’t show an example here of how to use each one of these libraries you’ll be able to find a simple one on the home page of each of them.

Excon: Another very popular library (25 million downloads) written in pure Ruby.

It provides a chainable interface for building HTTP requests and provides support for all of the usual functionality you’d expect from an HTTP library.

HTTP: While not as popular as the other libraries, this one has been a favorite of mine recently when connecting to APIs.

HTTParty: A very popular library (22 million downloads) that wraps the Net::HTTP code, providing an easier API to work with.

It’s fast, mostly because a lot of the heavy lifting is being done outside of Ruby, and the libcurl program is fast.

Curb: This gem provides bindings for the libcurl program (the same one you use from the command line with the curl command).Personally, I don’t find it simple to work with and tend to opt for one of the other options in this list. While it can accomplish everything you need it to, there is probably a reason why so many third-party HTTP libraries exist. Net::HTTP: Part of the Ruby standard library.There are quite a few HTTP libraries available in the Ruby ecosystem for making HTTP requests, so I won’t be able to touch on them all. Which HTTP Clients Are Available in Ruby?

Ruby http client code#

The rest of this article will explore some of the different options available in Ruby for dealing with HTTP and some techniques for organizing the code and troubleshooting when things go wrong or you want a bit more visibility into what is happening. Thankfully most of the more popular APIs, such as Twitter, Slack, and Stripe, already have client libraries written for them that encapsulate (hide) the actual lower-level HTTP request building and response parsing.īut when you have to connect to your internal services or lesser known APIs, which may not have a client library already built for them, well, we’re on our own. More specifically, this means crafting the correct URL, HTTP headers for authentication, pagination, response format, and finally, the body of the request which is most likely either as form data ( application/x-www-form-urlencoded) or as JSON. More likely than not, being the client is going to mean having to make HTTP requests and parse JSON responses. But with backend development going more and more to a microservices architecture, our Rails apps are going to more often have to act as the client in addition to the server. We can tail the logs to see what the incoming request looks like (the path, headers, params), how we responded, etc. In Rails, our apps are often the ones acting as the server, and we typically know how to troubleshoot the issues that inevitably arise. There are always two parties involved: The Client and the Server.