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:[email protected]/private/resource'

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'

Multipart

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

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

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.

Lower-level access

For cases not covered by the general API, you can use the RestClient::Resource class which provide a lower-level API, see the class’ rdoc 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

Meta

Written by Adam Wiggins, major modifications by Blake Mizerany, maintained by Archiloque

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

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

Main page: github.com/archiloque/rest-client

Rdoc: rdoc.info/projects/archiloque/rest-client

Mailing list: [email protected] (send a mail to subscribe).

IRC: #rest-client at freenode