purescript-simple-request

This is a library connecting purescript-http, purescript-aff and the Node.HTTP.Client module from purescript-node-http, with a bit of extra type-safety thrown in.

Usage

The types might be a little confusing: in general, a function with a "simple" prefix has a type signature with more arguments because its definition is simpler.

Some possible motivations for the functions in this library might be as follows:

simpleRequest: You need as much control over the request as possible. You're sending data to a server, need to set custom headers so the request goes through, and not sending a simple GET request. An example use case is writing bindings to some service's API.

requestURI: You have a URL to send the request to, and all you care about is the response. You might want to check what the status code is, maybe for raising an error if it isn't 200.

getURI: All you care about is the response body. This could be compared to a simple curl command with no flags set.

By example:

import Prelude
import Control.Monad.Aff as Aff
import Network.HTTP as HTTP
import Node.SimpleRequest as SR
import Control.Monad.Aff (Canceler())
import Control.Monad.Aff.Console (CONSOLE)
import Control.Monad.Eff (Eff)
import Control.Monad.Eff.Class (liftEff)
import Control.Monad.Eff.Console (logShow, log)
import Data.Either (either)
import Data.Options (Options, (:=))
import Data.Tuple.Nested ((/\))
import Node.HTTP (HTTP)
import Node.HTTP.Client (RequestOptions)

testOpts :: Options RequestOptions
testOpts = SR.hostname := "www.reddit.com"
        <> SR.path := "/r/purescript"
        <> SR.method := HTTP.GET
        <> SR.protocol := SR.HTTPS
        <> SR.headers := SR.headersFromFoldable [HTTP.UserAgent /\ "purescript-simple-request testing"]

main :: forall e. Eff ( console :: CONSOLE
                      , http :: HTTP | e
                      ) ( Canceler
                            ( console :: CONSOLE
                            , http :: HTTP | e
                            )
                        )
main = Aff.runAff logShow pure $ void do
  res1 <- Aff.attempt $ SR.requestURI "https://www.reddit.com/r/purescript.json"
  liftEff $ either (const $ log "aww :(") (const $ log "yay!") res1
  res2 <- SR.request testOpts
  liftEff $ log "Body:"
  liftEff $ log res2.body

See also the test/ folder.

Alternatives

For a much more low-level alternative for node, check out purescript-node-http.

If you want to make requests from the browser, the go-to is purescript-affjax which can also work on node via the npm package xhr2.

Installing

bower i purescript-simple-request