Responding to HTTP Requests in Eventmachine - ruby

Question

I have a very simple server for use in integration tests, built using eventmachine:
EM.run do
EM::start_server(server, port, HttpRecipient)
end
I can receive HTTP requests and parse them like so:
class HttpRecipient < EM::Connection
def initialize
##stored = ''
end
# Data is received in chunks, so here we wait until we've got a full web request before
# calling spool.
def receive_data(data)
##stored << data
begin
spool(##stored)
EM.stop
rescue WEBrick::HTTPStatus::BadRequest
#Not received a complete request yet
end
end
def spool(data)
#Parse the request
req = WEBrick::HTTPRequest.new(WEBrick::Config::HTTP)
req.parse(StringIO.new(##stored))
#Send a response, e.g. HTTP OK
end
end
The question is, how do I send a response? Eventmachine provides a send_data for sending responses, but that doesn't understand http. Similarly there is the em-http-request
module for sending requests, but it's not obvious that this is capable of generating responses.
I can generate HTTP messages manually and then send them using send_data, but I wonder if there is a clean way to use an existing http library, or the functionality built in to eventmachine?

Answer 1

If you want something easy then use Thin or Rainbows. It uses Eventmachine inside and provides Rack interface support.
# config.ru
http_server = proc do |env|
response = "Hello World!"
[200, {"Connection" => "close", "Content-Length" => response.bytesize.to_s}, [response]]
end
run http_server
And then
>> thin start -R config.ru
UPD.
If you need server to run in parallel you could run it in a Thread
require 'thin'
class ThreadedServer
def initialize(*args)
#server = Thin::Server.new(*args)
end
def start
#thread = Thread.start do
#server.start
end
end
def stop
#server.stop
if #thread
#thread.join
#thread = nil
end
end
end
http_server = proc do |env|
response = "Hello World!"
[200, {"Connection" => "close", "Content-Length" => response.bytesize.to_s}, [response]]
end
server = ThreadedServer.new http_server
server.start
# Some job with server
server.stop
# Server is down