REST Client — simple DSL for accessing REST resources

A simple REST client for Ruby, inspired by the Sinatra’s microframework style of specifying actions: get, put, post, delete.

Usage: Raw URL

  require 'rest_client'

  RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource'
  RestClient.get 'https://user:password@example.com/private/resource'

  RestClient.post 'http://example.com/resource', :param1 => 'one', :nested => { :param2 => 'two' }

  RestClient.delete 'http://example.com/resource'

See RestClient module docs for details.

Usage: ActiveResource-Style

  resource = RestClient::Resource.new 'http://example.com/resource'
  resource.get

  private_resource = RestClient::Resource.new 'https://example.com/private/resource', :user => 'adam', :password => 'secret', :timeout => 20, :open_timeout => 5
  private_resource.put File.read('pic.jpg'), :content_type => 'image/jpg'

See RestClient::Resource module docs for details.

Usage: Resource Nesting

  site = RestClient::Resource.new('http://example.com')
  site['posts/1/comments'].post 'Good article.', :content_type => 'text/plain'

See RestClient::Resource docs for details.

Shell

The restclient shell command gives an IRB session with RestClient already loaded:

  $ restclient
  >> RestClient.get 'http://example.com'

Specify a URL argument for get/post/put/delete on that resource:

  $ restclient http://example.com
  >> put '/resource', 'data'

Add a user and password for authenticated resources:

  $ restclient https://example.com user pass
  >> delete '/private/resource'

Create ~/.restclient for named sessions:

  sinatra:
    url: http://localhost:4567
  rack:
    url: http://localhost:9292
  private_site:
    url: http://example.com
    username: user
    password: pass

Then invoke:

  $ restclient private_site

Use as a one-off, curl-style:

  $ restclient get http://example.com/resource > output_body

  $ restclient put http://example.com/resource < input_body

Logging

Write calls to a log filename (can also be "stdout" or "stderr"):

  RestClient.log = '/tmp/restclient.log'

Or set an environment variable to avoid modifying the code:

  $ RESTCLIENT_LOG=stdout path/to/my/program

Either produces logs like this:

  RestClient.get "http://some/resource"
  # => 200 OK | text/html 250 bytes
  RestClient.put "http://some/resource", "payload"
  # => 401 Unauthorized | application/xml 340 bytes

Note that these logs are valid Ruby, so you can paste them into the restclient shell or a script to replay your sequence of rest calls.

Proxy

All calls to RestClient, including Resources, will use the proxy specified by RestClient.proxy:

  RestClient.proxy = "http://proxy.example.com/"
  RestClient.get "http://some/resource"
  # => response from some/resource as proxied through proxy.example.com

Often the proxy url is set in an environment variable, so you can do this to use whatever proxy the system is configured to use:

  RestClient.proxy = ENV['http_proxy']

Cookies

Request and Response objects know about HTTP cookies, and will automatically extract and set headers for them as needed:

  response = RestClient.get 'http://example.com/action_which_sets_session_id'
  response.cookies
  # => {"_applicatioN_session_id" => "1234"}

  response2 = RestClient.post(
    'http://localhost:3000/',
    {:param1 => "foo"},
    {:cookies => {:session_id => "1234"}}
  )
  # ...response body

Meta

Written by Adam Wiggins (adam at heroku dot com)

Patches contributed by: Chris Anderson, Greg Borenstein, Ardekantur, Pedro Belo, Rafael Souza, Rick Olson, Aman Gupta, Blake Mizerany, Brian Donovan, Ivan Makfinsky, Marc-André Cournoyer, Coda Hale, Tetsuo Watanabe, Dusty Doris, Lennon Day-Reynolds, James Edward Gray II, Cyril Rohr, and Juan Alvarez

Released under the MIT License: www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

rest-client.heroku.com

github.com/adamwiggins/rest-client