= REST Client -- simple DSL for accessing HTTP and REST resources

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

* Main page: https://github.com/rest-client/rest-client
* Mailing list: rest.client@librelist.com (send a mail to subscribe).

== Usage: Raw URL

  require 'rest_client'

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

  RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource', {:params => {:id => 50, 'foo' => 'bar'}}

  RestClient.get 'https://user:password@example.com/private/resource', {:accept => :json}

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

  RestClient.post "http://example.com/resource", { 'x' => 1 }.to_json, :content_type => :json, :accept => :json

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

  response = RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource'
  response.code
  ➔ 200
  response.cookies
  ➔ {"Foo"=>"BAR", "QUUX"=>"QUUUUX"}
  response.headers
  ➔ {:content_type=>"text/html; charset=utf-8", :cache_control=>"private" ...
  response.to_str
  ➔ \n<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN\"\n   \"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd\">\n\n<html ....

  RestClient.post( url,
    {
      :transfer => {
        :path => '/foo/bar',
        :owner => 'that_guy',
        :group => 'those_guys'
      },
       :upload => {
        :file => File.new(path, 'rb')
      }
    })

== Multipart

Yeah, that's right!  This does multipart sends for you!

  RestClient.post '/data', :myfile => File.new("/path/to/image.jpg", 'rb')

This does two things for you:

* Auto-detects that you have a File value sends it as multipart
* Auto-detects the mime of the file and sets it in the HEAD of the payload for each entry

If you are sending params that do not contain a File object but the payload needs to be multipart then:

  RestClient.post '/data', :foo => 'bar', :multipart => true

== Usage: ActiveResource-Style

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

  private_resource = RestClient::Resource.new 'https://example.com/private/resource', 'user', 'pass'
  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.

== Exceptions (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html)

* for result codes between 200 and 207, a RestClient::Response will be returned
* for result codes 301, 302 or 307, the redirection will be followed if the request is a GET or a HEAD
* for result code 303, the redirection will be followed and the request transformed into a GET
* for other cases, a RestClient::Exception holding the Response will be raised; a specific exception class will be thrown for known error codes

   RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource'
   ➔ RestClient::ResourceNotFound: RestClient::ResourceNotFound

   begin
     RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource'
   rescue => e
     e.response
   end
   ➔ 404 Resource Not Found | text/html 282 bytes

== Result handling

A block can be passed to the RestClient method. This block will then be called with the Response.
Response.return! can be called to invoke the default response's behavior.

  # Don't raise exceptions but return the response
  RestClient.get('http://example.com/resource'){|response, request, result| response }
  ➔ 404 Resource Not Found | text/html 282 bytes

  # Manage a specific error code
  RestClient.get('http://my-rest-service.com/resource'){ |response, request, result, &block|
    case response.code
    when 200
      p "It worked !"
      response
    when 423
      raise SomeCustomExceptionIfYouWant
    else
      response.return!(request, result, &block)
    end
  }

  # Follow redirections for all request types and not only for get and head
  # RFC : "If the 301, 302 or 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD,
  #        the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user,
  #        since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued."
  RestClient.get('http://my-rest-service.com/resource'){ |response, request, result, &block|
    if [301, 302, 307].include? response.code
      response.follow_redirection(request, result, &block)
    else
      response.return!(request, result, &block)
    end
  }

== Non-normalized URIs

If you need to normalize URIs, e.g. to work with International Resource Identifiers (IRIs),
use the addressable gem (http://addressable.rubyforge.org/api/) in your code:

  require 'addressable/uri'
  RestClient.get(Addressable::URI.parse("http://www.詹姆斯.com/").normalize.to_str)

== Lower-level access

For cases not covered by the general API, you can use the RestClient::Request class, which provides a lower-level API.

You can:

* specify ssl parameters
* override cookies
* manually handle the response (e.g. to operate on it as a stream rather than reading it all into memory)

See RestClient::Request's documentation for more information.

== 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

To enable logging you can:

* set RestClient.log with a Ruby Logger, or
* set an environment variable to avoid modifying the code (in this case you can use a file name, "stdout" or "stderr"):

   $ 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']

== Query parameters

Request objects know about query parameters and will automatically add them to
the URL for GET, HEAD and DELETE requests, escaping the keys and values as needed:

  RestClient.get 'http://example.com/resource', :params => {:foo => 'bar', :baz => 'qux'}
  # will GET http://example.com/resource?foo=bar&baz=qux

== 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

== SSL Client Certificates

  RestClient::Resource.new(
    'https://example.com',
    :ssl_client_cert  =>  OpenSSL::X509::Certificate.new(File.read("cert.pem")),
    :ssl_client_key   =>  OpenSSL::PKey::RSA.new(File.read("key.pem"), "passphrase, if any"),
    :ssl_ca_file      =>  "ca_certificate.pem",
    :verify_ssl       =>  OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER
  ).get

Self-signed certificates can be generated with the openssl command-line tool.

== Hook

RestClient.add_before_execution_proc add a Proc to be called before each execution.
It's handy if you need direct access to the HTTP request.

Example:

  # Add oauth support using the oauth gem
  require 'oauth'
  access_token = ...

  RestClient.add_before_execution_proc do |req, params|
    access_token.sign! req
  end

  RestClient.get 'http://example.com'

== More

Need caching, more advanced logging or any ability provided by Rack middleware?

Have a look at rest-client-components: http://github.com/crohr/rest-client-components

== Credits

REST Client Team:: Matthew Manning, Lawrence Leonard Gilbert, Andy Brody

Creator:: Adam Wiggins

Maintainer Emeritus:: Julien Kirch

Major contributions:: Blake Mizerany, Julien Kirch

Patches contributed by many, including Chris Anderson, Greg Borenstein, Ardekantur, Pedro Belo, Rafael Souza, Rick Olson, Aman Gupta, François Beausoleil and Nick Plante.

== Legal

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

"Master Shake" photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/solgrundy/924205581/) by
"SolGrundy"; used under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
Generic license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)
