Reddit Base

A minimal reddit API client for Ruby.

Disclaimer: Assume I'm an untrustworthy fool until 1.0.0. I'll try to avoid it, but point releases may drop functionality up until that point.

Motivation

Managing major versions of an API client can be tricky, especially when the API us unversioned, inconsistent and outside of your control.

This client library aims to provide minimal support for the reddit API, reducing the need for frequent breaking changes and to act as the backbone for more other higher-level API clients.

Installation

Via Rubygems:

gem install reddit-base

Or in your Gemfile with Bundler:

gem reddit-base

What it Does

• Authentication (user/password, cookie, OAuth2 access token).
• Rate limiting.
• Modhash handling (reddit's CSRF protection).
• JSON coersion.
• Forwarding.
• Multipart POST.
• Reddit error wrapping.
• Retries for common errors (e.g. Gateway Timeout).
• Request caching.

What it Doesn't

• OAuth2 token negotiation.
• Parsing of Reddit "Things" and "Kinds."
• Parsing of common attributes like dates and times.
• HTML entity decoding (beware of "body" and "selftext").

Usage

Retrieve the JSON for a particular endpoint:

require 'reddit/base'

client = Reddit::Base::Client.new(user: USERNAME, password: PASSWORD)
client.get('/r/AskReddit')

Making a new self post:

require 'reddit/base'

client = Reddit::Base::Client.new(user: USERNAME, password: PASSWORD)
client.post('/api/submit', kind: 'self', sr: SUBREDDIT, title: 'Hello,', text: 'World!')

Authentication

Examples:

# Username and password.
client = Reddit::Base::Client.new(user: USERNAME, password: PASSWORD)

# Cookie.
client = Reddit::Base::Client.new(cookie: COOKIE)

# OAuth2 access token.
client = Reddit::Base::Client.new(access_token: ACCESS_TOKEN)

File Uploads

For example, uploading an image to a subreddit you moderate:

image_upload = Reddit::Base::UploadIO.new('/path/to/your/image.png', 'image/png')
client.post('/api/upload_sr_img.json', r: SUBREDDIT, file: image_upload, header: 0, name: 'example'

Traversal

Client returns a type of Hashie::Mash so instead of:

client.get('/r/AskReddit').body['data']['children']

You can do:

client.get('/r/AskReddit').body.data.children

Caching

Reddit recommends not request the same endpoint more than once every 30 seconds, and Client respects that.

But this can be by passed by passing in a nocache parameter, useful if you're polling a frequently-updated endpoint, e.g.:

client.get('/r/all/comments', nocache: true)

Recommended Reading

• Project Information
  • Changes: CHANGES.md
• reddit API
  • API documentation: http://www.reddit.com/dev/api
  • API wiki: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API
  • JSON wiki: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/JSON
  • Project on Github: https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Contributors

• Maintainer: Daniel O'Brien

This project is copyright 2014 by its contributors, refer to LICENSE file for licensing information.