"A dizzying lifetime... reeling by on celluloid" -- Rush / Between The Wheels
Reel is a fast, non-blocking "evented" web server built on http_parser.rb, websocket-driver, Celluloid::IO, and nio4r. Thanks to Celluloid, Reel also works great for multithreaded applications and provides traditional multithreaded blocking I/O support too.
Connections to Reel can be either non-blocking and handled entirely within the Reel::Server thread (handling HTTP, HTTPS, or UNIX sockets), or the same connections can be dispatched to worker threads where they will perform ordinary blocking IO. Reel provides no built-in thread pool, however you can build one yourself using Celluloid.pool, or because Celluloid already pools threads to begin with, you can simply use an actor per connection.
This gives you the best of both worlds: non-blocking I/O for when you're primarily I/O bound, and threads for where you're compute bound.
Is it any good?
Documentation
Please see the Reel Wiki for detailed documentation and usage notes.
YARD documentation is also available.
Framework Adapters
Rack
A Rack adapter for Reel is available at:
https://github.com/celluloid/reel-rack
Webmachine
The most notable library with native Reel support is webmachine-ruby, an advanced HTTP framework for Ruby with a complete state machine for proper processing of HTTP/1.1 requests. Together with Reel, Webmachine provides full streaming support for both requests and responses.
To use Reel with Webmachine, add the following to your Gemfile:
gem 'webmachine', git: 'git://github.com/seancribbs/webmachine-ruby.git'
Then use config.adapter = :Reel
when configuring a Webmachine app, e.g:
MyApp = Webmachine::Application.new do |app|
app.routes do
add ['*'], MyHome
end
app.configure do |config|
config.ip = MYAPP_IP
config.port = MYAPP_PORT
config.adapter = :Reel
# Optional: handler for incoming websockets
config.adapter_options[:websocket_handler] = proc do |websocket|
# websocket is a Reel::WebSocket
websocket << "hello, world"
end
end
end
MyApp.run
See the Webmachine documentation for further information
Ruby API
Reel aims to provide a "bare metal" API that other frameworks (such as Rack and Webmachine) can leverage. This API can also be nice in performance critical applications.
Block Form
Reel lets you pass a block to initialize which receives connections:
require 'celluloid/autostart'
require 'reel'
Reel::Server::HTTP.supervise("0.0.0.0", 3000) do |connection|
# Support multiple keep-alive requests per connection
connection.each_request do |request|
# WebSocket support
if request.websocket?
puts "Client made a WebSocket request to: #{request.url}"
websocket = request.websocket
websocket << "Hello everyone out there in WebSocket land"
websocket.close
else
puts "Client requested: #{request.method} #{request.url}"
request.respond :ok, "Hello, world!"
end
end
end
sleep
When we read a request from the incoming connection, we'll either get back a Reel::Request object, indicating a normal HTTP connection, or a Reel::WebSocket object for WebSockets connections.
Subclass Form
You can also subclass Reel, which allows additional customizations:
require 'celluloid/autostart'
require 'reel'
class MyServer < Reel::Server::HTTP
def initialize(host = "127.0.0.1", port = 3000)
super(host, port, &method(:on_connection))
end
def on_connection(connection)
connection.each_request do |request|
if request.websocket?
handle_websocket(request.websocket)
else
handle_request(request)
end
end
end
def handle_request(request)
request.respond :ok, "Hello, world!"
end
def handle_websocket(sock)
sock << "Hello everyone out there in WebSocket land!"
sock.close
end
end
MyServer.run
Supported Ruby Versions
This library supports and is tested against the following Ruby versions:
- Ruby (MRI) 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
- JRuby 9000
Contributing
- Fork this repository on GitHub
- Make your changes and send us a pull request
- If we like them we'll merge them
- If we've accepted a patch, feel free to ask for commit access
License
Copyright (c) 2012-2016 Tony Arcieri. Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for further details.