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Restfully is a general-purpose client library for RESTful APIs. It is written in Ruby. Its goal is to abstract the nitty-gritty details of exchanging HTTP requests between the user-agent and the server. It also discovers resources at runtime, which means should the API change and add a new functionality, the client will automatically discover it.
In the next section we will describe how to install Restfully on various platforms.
First, be sure you have a version of the Ruby_ interpreter on your system:
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10 patchlevel 249) [i686-darwin10.2.0]
If that command returns an error, then you need to install Ruby. If you have a version lower than 1.8.6, you should probably consider upgrading to a newer version.
On recent distributions (e.g. Debian Squeeze), you should be able to install all the required dependencies with:
$ apt-get install ruby rubygems libxml2-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev
Now, install Restfully:
$ gem install restfully --no-ri --no-rdoc
If you will be interacting with XML payloads, you should also install the libxml-ruby library:
$ gem install libxml-ruby --no-ri --no-rdoc
If you are working in the BonFIRE project, there is an additional package that can be installed for additional functionalities:
$ gem install restfully-addons --no-ri --no-rdoc
Now, test that you have access to the Restfully binary:
$ which restfully
/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/restfully
On Debian Squeeze, you may need to add the path to the gem binaries to your $PATH:
$ export PATH="/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH"
The following instructions successfully installed Restfully on Microsoft Windows XP.
To install Ruby download the Ruby 1.8.7-pxxx RubyInstaller from http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/.
Run this installer and install Ruby into C:\Ruby187\bin.
Add C:\Ruby187\bin to your path environment variable.
Download and install DevKit as described in https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/Development-Kit.
Running the ruby commands mentioned stages 4 and 5 in that page produces output like the following:
C:\Documents and Settings\ahume>cd C:\DevKit
C:\DevKit>ruby dk.rb init
[INFO] found RubyInstaller v1.8.7 at C:/Ruby187
Initialization complete! Please review and modify the auto-generated
'config.yml' file to ensure it contains the root directories to all
of the installed Rubies you want enhanced by the DevKit.
C:\DevKit>ruby dk.rb install
[INFO] Updating convenience notice gem override for 'C:/Ruby187'
[INFO] Installing 'C:/Ruby187/lib/ruby/site_ruby/devkit.rb'
C:\DevKit>gem install rdiscount --platform=ruby
Fetching: rdiscount-1.6.8.gem (100%)
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed rdiscount-1.6.8
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rdiscount-1.6.8...
Installing RDoc documentation for rdiscount-1.6.8...
C:\DevKit>ruby -rubygems -e "require 'rdiscount'; puts RDiscount.new('**Hello RubyInstaller**').to_html"
<p><strong>Hello RubyInstaller</strong></p>
Install the restfully gems using the following command:
gem install restfully --no-ri --no-rdoc
For example:
C:\DevKit>gem install restfully --no-ri --no-rdoc
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Fetching: mime-types-1.16.gem (100%)
Fetching: rest-client-1.6.3.gem (100%)
Fetching: rack-1.3.2.gem (100%)
Fetching: rest-client-components-1.2.0.gem (100%)
Fetching: rack-cache-1.0.2.gem (100%)
Fetching: backports-2.3.0.gem (100%)
Fetching: addressable-2.2.6.gem (100%)
Fetching: restfully-0.8.6.gem (100%)
Successfully installed json-1.5.3
Successfully installed mime-types-1.16
Successfully installed rest-client-1.6.3
Successfully installed rack-1.3.2
Successfully installed rest-client-components-1.2.0
Successfully installed rack-cache-1.0.2
Successfully installed backports-2.3.0
Successfully installed addressable-2.2.6
Successfully installed restfully-0.8.6
9 gems installed
To install libxml-ruby follow the instructions at http://vairoj.com/2010/06/installing-libxml-ruby-on-windows-the-painless-way.html.
But for me the stage two command did not work so I used:
gem install libxml-ruby
rather than:
gem install libxml-ruby --platform x86-mswin32-60
and it worked fine.
Restfully should now work for you.