friendly-responses

Provides friendly responses for validation and server errors to RESTful Rails JSON APIs.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'friendly-responses'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install friendly-responses

Usage

Simply include the FriendlyResponses module in your controller to enable friendly-responses. You may prefer to include this module in your application controller or a controller your API controllers will subclass as shown in the example below.

# app/controllers/api_controller.rb
class ApiController < ApplicationController
  include FriendlyResponses
  # ...custom controller code
end

Validation errors

The friendly-responses gem provides a convenient way to respond with validation errors that are actually useful to API clients. In the example controller action below, we call the #respond_with_invalid_record method with our model to create a friendly error response.

# app/controller/frienemies_controller.rb
class FrienemiesController < ApiController
  def create
    @frienemy = Frienemy.new frienemy_params

    if @frienemy.save
      render action: 'show', status: :created
    else
      respond_with_invalid_record @frienemy
    end
  end
end

Here is an example of a request that triggers a validation error and a friendly response.

$ curl -i -X POST http://localhost:3000/frienemies \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{ "frienemy": { "name": "Donald Trump" } }'

{
  "errors": [
    "Why you can't have a frienemy for no reason"
  ],
  "frienemy": {
    "errors": {
      "why": [
        "you can't have a frienemy for no reason"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kalkomey/friendly-responses.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.