nozzle

Nozzle is a Lua library that allows to write filters and chain them together into pipelines. When data passes through the pipeline, each filter can inspect, modify or reject it.

What does that mean?

Say you're writing a web application, and you have three different functions to add, update or remove a user to your application.

function add_user (data)
	-- do your thing here
end

function update_user (data)
	-- lookup the user and update
end

function delete_user (data)
	-- delete the user
end

You expect that the data needed for each function is POSTed as a json, so on each function you have to decode the incoming data. Since the data can be invalid, you have to test for that and act accordingly.

function add_user (raw_data)
	local ok, data = pcall(json.decode, raw_data)
	if not ok then
		-- return a status code or something
		return
	end
	-- do your thing here
end

Do you add that code to every function? What if you also need to validate that the posted data has a certain structure? Each function would start to grow a lot of boilerplate code before you can do the actual work (ie. add a new user).

What nozzle provides is a way to build those validations as separate functions and later compose them as you see fit. If the data does not pass a given stage in validations, subsequent stages won't be executed.

local function add_user (data)
	-- just deal with adding the user. data has been already validated.
end

new_add_user_function = do_some_logging .. assert_json .. assert_structure .. add_user

You are not restricted to just do validations. Each stage can validate, transform, do some logging, whatever. You can mix and match other libraries and plug them together, like building a pipeline consisting of a couple of validations using valua and then a structure validation using Tamale.

More detailed information can be found in the manual.

Installing

Install it with LuaRocks:

luarocks install nozzle

Author

Ignacio Burgueño - @iburgueno - https://uy.linkedin.com/in/ignacioburgueno

License

MIT/X11