Original Author:
Ryan Pavlik rpavlik@iastate.edu abiryan@ryand.net http://academic.cleardefinition.com
Iowa State University HCI Graduate Program/VRAC
This is a bit of code I pulled together to be able to use simple JSON-based web apis (like GitHub's api v3) using lua. json4lua got me most of the way there, but their RPC client was a bit less flexible than I needed, and SSL support was essential.
Fortunately, a little metatable magic gave me a nice proxy-based API allowing code like github:get "/repo/vance-group/vr-jugglua/issues", and some
helpful mailing list posts were transformed into https.lua so SSL could be transparently used.
My friendly fork of json4lua (which merges changes from the
existing network and does minor tweaks) is pure Lua, and is included as
a submodule. It depends only on Lua 5.1 and Lua Socket 2.0,
which is pretty prevalent. If your system doesn't have json4lua as a
package, the Makefile's default all target will copy all the
json4lua files to the root dir of this repo so you can run stuff without
problems. (make clean will reverse it, don't worry.)
The HTTPS support depends on LuaSec aka require "ssl", but only if
you actually try to access an https web service.
lunatest is included as a submodule, and is only needed for running
the tests. If you don't mind the aforementioned copying, make test
will run the small test suite. Note that the tests use the GitHub API,
which is an https service.
The only actual "new" files are jsonapi.lua and https.lua. Usage
instructions are at the top of jsonapi.lua. For an example of how to
use it, see github.lua - note that it requires lua's stdlib modules
for pretty-printing.
This code will get the issues from GitHub's v3 api for the vancegroup/vrjugglua project:
-- Load the module
local jsonapi = require "jsonapi"
-- Create a proxy
local github = jsonapi.createProxy("https://api.github.com")
-- Perform a "GET" request on the listed path, returning the issues in a
-- table decoded from JSON.
local issues, code, response = github:get "/repos/vancegroup/vr-jugglua/issues"
-- Note that usually, you can just save the first return value if you need any at all.
-- If it's nil, that means the response was empty or couldn't be parsed by json4lua.