There is a library in Python that I love called "Requests". Requests is a HTTP client build on urllib3. "requests doc".
I am looking for something similar in Ruby. Basically what I need is:
Upload files support (multipart/form-data).
Easy get/post.
Cookies can be passed from a response object to a request object (build manually login script).
Stable and Flexible.
Sessions support (to not have to handle cookies manually if we don't have too).
I've looked at Typhoeus, but the code example in the home page doesn't work; they have moved code along and the get method is not longer directly accessible like that, so it's not starting well. Curb seems nice and I like cURL, there is also rest-client, which seems popular, and em-http seems pretty fast according to benchmark. There is a also Patron and curb-fu, which I haven't have the time to try. And, of course, Net:HTTP. But, it doesn't seem to have a mainstream solution that everyone points to.
I think a lot of people have been in my situation and I wonder what they have choosen and why?
The author of the comparison is the author of httpclient, but from the looks of it the comparison is fair.
For a more narrative style with some explanation of the matrix, see http://www.slideshare.net/HiroshiNakamura/rubyhttp-clients-comparison from the same author.
The comparison comes out partly in favor of httpclient, which I can also recommend. Simple, featureful, compatible with all Ruby platforms and performant. Better cookie support than anything else out there, but the presentation mentions that cookies may leak from one (malevolent) site to another if you use the same client object. Don't know if this is still true.
There is https://github.com/cyx/requests, which is exactly what the question is asking for, a port of the requests lib from python.
The built-in OpenURI is the first place to look. It's simple and handles the basics nicely.
Typhoeus, which I've used several times for parallel processes, works nicely. Documentation and the codebase are available at Github.
irb(main):009:0> response = Typhoeus::Request.get("www.example.com")
=> #<Typhoeus::Response:0x007ffbcc067cf8 #code=302, #curl_return_code=0, #curl_error_message="No error", #status_message=nil, #http_version=nil, #headers="HTTP/1.0 302 Found\r\nLocation: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/\r\nServer: BigIP\r\nConnection: close\r\nContent-Length: 0\r\n\r\n", #body="", #time=0.035584, #requested_url=nil, #requested_http_method=nil, #start_time=nil, #start_transfer_time=0.035529, #app_connect_time=2.8e-05, #pretransfer_time=0.000429, #connect_time=2.8e-05, #name_lookup_time=2.8e-05, #request=:method => :get,
:url => www.example.com, #effective_url="HTTP://www.example.com", #primary_ip="192.0.43.10", #redirect_count=0, #mock=false>
irb(main):010:0> puts response.headers
HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.iana.org/domains/example/
Server: BigIP
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0
I use Net::HTTP occasionally too, but OpenURI and Typhoeus, with Hydra, have proven to be easy to use and integrate with my code.
I've eventually found this HTTPClient :
https://github.com/nahi/httpclient
I've started using it, it matches the features I wanted, and more over it's pretty fast according to some benchmark. It also support some advanced things like streaming or chunked response. It's shame though it's not famous in the ruby community. :)
Have you looked at the HTTParty gem?
If you need cookies and form handling, mechanize is the only way to go.
I'm sorry to hear, that Typhoeus didn't work out for you. The reason is, that the README shows howto work with Typhoeus v0.5.0.rc which can be installed with
gem install typhoeus --pre
or
gem "typhoeus", git: "git://github.com/typhoeus/typhoeus.git"
.
There is no session support for Typhoeus but other than that it could be a good fit. At least its stable as hell since it is build on top of libcurl.
File sending example:
Typhoeus.post("www.example.com/file", body: { file: File.open("testfile.txt","r") })
There is unfortunately no shortcut to deal with cookies, you have to set them manually:
Typhoeus.get("www.example.com/needs_cookie", headers: { Cookie: "PRIVATE" })
TLDR: I would choose Typhoeus for its speed and libcurl if you're willing to set things up yourself. Otherwise I would look into Faraday and use it with the Typhoeus adapter.
Edit: I've added installation instructions to the README.
Edit: 0.5 is released.
This question seems to be lacking recent answers. So am filling in the void.
Coming from python myself, and having loved requests library for what it does easily, I recently discovered a very nice Ruby equivalent in rest_client
It supports all the features mentioned in the question, and seems to be very nice from usability perspective - what requests library aimed to achieve.
Related
I am writing a script to test various web-services in ruby. To make http requests thus far I have been using Net::HTTP but today I realized I needed to make an OPTIONS request and retrieve some JSON from the response.
Unfortunately ruby does not currently support this: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8429
Does anyone know of gem that supports this or some other way to get this response?
This is an alternative which supports lot of options
https://rubygems.org/gems/curb
Mechanize Gem
Try this gem it's very usefull and simple in use. I use it for parsing and another different tasks.
I wrote my own FaceBook library that uses actual Curl requests, not libcurl.
Is there a way to test it? I'm asking this because most solutions involve using something like fakeweb which as far as I can tell will not work here.
The existing code can be found on my github page.
One approach would be to use a different host/port in test mode (eg localhost:12345)
Then in your test run a sinatra or webrick servlet on that port that you configure to respond to the requests your code should be making
You could mock Request.dispatcher with an expected behavior, pretty much like Fakeweb would do.
There are a few examples on this file, specially https://github.com/chrisk/fakeweb/blob/master/lib/fake_web/ext/net_http.rb#L44.
When running your tests/specs, monkey-patch the run method of your Request class to hook into the Marston VCR library. See the existing library_hooks subdir for examples and ideas on how to do this -- the fakeweb implementation is a good place to start.
VCR works well with live services like Facebook's because it captures interactions "as is", and VCRs can be easily re-recorded when the services change.
I'm running into problems with your library, however. You need to require the cgi and json libraries; it also looks like it requires a Rails environment (it's failing to find with_indifferent_access on Hash).
I have written a ruby script to screen scrape something using the 'open-uri' and 'hpricot' gems - everything works great so far.
But now I have to screen scrape something which is returned after a form is submitted via a javascript function (called by an 'onchange' event handler from a drop-down menu):
function submit_form() {
document.list.action="/some/sort/of/path";
document.list.submit();
}
AFAIK, open-uri lets you submit only GET requests. And if I'm not mistaken, a POST request would be needed here.
So my question is: what do I need to install and to 'require' and how would the ruby code then look like (to make that POST request) - sorry, I'm still pretty much of a n00b...
Thank you very much for your help!
Tom
I think you definitely should use Mechanize. It provides a nifty interface to interact with remote pages, forms on them, and so forth (see this example).
The Ruby standard library has the http class, which naturally supports the POST operation.
Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse('http://www.example.com/some/sort/of/path')
If you find the API there less than optimal, then take a look at the httparty gem
Finally, while hpricot is a great gem, it isn't actively developed any longer. You should consider moving to nokogiri which practically replaces hpricot and improves upon it.
I've been using Ruby for quite some time now, however unlike PHP, as far as I know there is not a standard http/Curl (fetching, processing forms) like library that is easy and powerful like PHP's libCuRL binding.
While Net::HTTP is part of the Ruby standard library, I always find that API hard to remember and program with.
Can anyone give suggestions on which http/curl library I should use over Net::HTTP?
Take a look at HTTParty or REST Client.
I would recommend using the Typhoeus gem. It's got a pretty clean API and allows you to make concurrent requests.
I'll second Ryan's recommendation for Typhoeus, and recommend HTTPClient also. Both are very full featured and handle parallel
requests easily.
For simple requests it's hard to beat Open-URI for its simplicity:
require 'open-uri'
html = open('http://www.example.com').read
If you're parsing a page it works great with Nokogiri:
require 'open-uri'
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://www.example.com'))
I wrote a wrapper for the Net:HTTP lib recently, its very very simplistic. I wanted something with a simple API that was easy to use and remember, it's been working well for me:
https://github.com/ctcherry/plain_http
ruby newbie alert! (hey that rhymes :))
I have read the official definition but still come up empty handed. What exactly is it when they say middleware? Is the purpose using ruby with https?
the smallish tutorial at patnaik's blog makes things clearer but how do I do something with it on localhost? I have ruby 1.9.2 installed along with rack gem and mongrel server.
Do I start mongrel first? How?
Just to add a simplistic explanation of Rack (as I feel that is missing):
Rack is basically a way in which a web app can communicate with a web server. The communication goes like this:
The web server tells the app about the environment - this contains mainly what the user sent in as his request - the url, the headers, whether it's a GET or a POST, etc.
The web app responds with three things:
the status code which will be something like 200 when everything went OK and above 400 when something went wrong.
the headers which is information web browsers can use like information on how long to hold on to the webpage in their cache and other stuff.
the body which is the actual webpage you see in the browser.
These two steps more or less can define the whole process by which web apps work.
So a very simple Rack app could look like this:
class MyApp
def call(environment) # this method has to be named call
[200, # the status code
{"Content-Type" => "text/plain", "Content-length" => "11" }, # headers
["Hello world"]] # the body
end
end
# presuming you have rack & webrick
if $0 == __FILE__
require 'rack'
Rack::Handler::WEBrick.run MyApp.new
end
You would do well to search for other questions & answers that make sense to you. Try "Getting Started with Rails" or "Ruby Web Development". A lot of different topics on this site have been devoted to this exact subject, so you might save yourself some trouble there...
Ignoring the specifics of your question for a minute, it seems like you want to learn Ruby and build web apps. Before you start delving into Rack or Mongrel or anything else, you should know that there are 2 well established frameworks that help build Ruby web applications. The first is Ruby on Rails, and the other is Sinatra. There are many others, but these are the most well documented on Stack Overflow and the internet in general.
Check out the following links for some background...
www.rubyonrails.org
SO: building-a-website-best-practice-and-architecture-with-ruby
www.railstutorial.org
SO: learning-ruby-on-rails
If you still have a burning desire to answer your question - "what is rack?", you should follow the same process, and end up at this Stack Overflow Answer:
What is Rack middleware?
Good luck!
Very nice answers yes indeed. For my two cents I'll add this because if you know how to get to the documentation behind the scenes here you will find lots of information as I have it stashed here and by no means is all that I have.
http://myrackapps.herokuapp.com/