act_as_api_client

How to create api clients for your application? What is a better way to encapsualte interactions with third party APIs? My answer is act_as_api_client.

Let's assume you have a typical Rails or any ruby application and want to play around with an API, Github for example. See the Usage section to find how to use existing preconfigured API's and encapsulate all logic inside APIClient classes.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'act_as_api_client'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install act_as_api_client

Usage

Folder for clients:

Create a folder in your app for examples api_clients. This will be the place where you will keep all servies responsible for communication with external HTTP APIs.

Create API client class:

For example, you need to fetch and update Github repositories, then you class may have a form like this:

class GithubClient < ApiClient
  act_as_api_client for: :github_repositories
end

In case you want to provide and use authorization token for Github:

class GithubClient < ApiClient
  act_as_api_client for: :github_repositories,
                    with: {
                      token: <your_token> # ENV variable of secret
                    }
end

btw, all values from with hash will be availabe in tour clients as instance variable @options

Use it:

Let's fetch all repositories from Rails organization:

github_client = GithubClient.new()

github_client.find('Rukomoynikov/tabled')
github_client.find_by(organization: 'rails')
github_client.where('rails', per_page: 100)

Voila.

List of supported API clients

1. Github Repositories

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.