Grape + Goliath Example REST API

What is this?

• Grape is micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.
• Goliath is a non-blocking Ruby web server

Together you can create a highly scalable API and use the nice features of Grape to specify how your REST API will work.

Getting Started

First take a copy of the project

git clone https://github.com/djones/grape-goliath-example.git
cd grape-goliath-example/

Install dependencies

bundle install

Next create and migrate your database

rake db:setup

Finally start the server and you're done!

ruby server.rb -vs

Now let's list all the posts in the database:

curl http://localhost:9000/v1/posts.json
=> []

A blank array in response tells us there are no posts yet.

Adding a Post

curl -X POST -d '{"post":{"title":"David Jones","body":"this is my message"}}' http://localhost:9000/v1/posts/create

Now list all the posts again

curl http://localhost:9000/v1/posts.json
=> [{"body":"this is my message","created_at":"2012-05-11T13:35:03-07:00","id":1,"title":"David Jones","updated_at":"2012-05-11T13:35:03-07:00"}]

Your first post has now shown up.

Next Steps

This is just a basic Grape API example. You can see the post API specified in app/api/posts.rb. You could expand that API and add your own models in app/models. Grape's readme has some basic usage examples that will help get you started.

Deploy on Heroku

First we create a new Heroku application

heroku create --stack cedar YOURAPPNAME

Next we push the code to Heroku

git push heroku master

Finally we need to migrate the database on Heroku

heroku run rake db:migrate RACK_ENV=production

Now you should be able to request posts from your app and get an empty array back as there are no posts saved yet.

curl http://YOURAPPNAME.herokuapp.com/v1/posts.json
=> []

Next you could use the "Adding a Post" example above to write your first post to the server.

Extras

You can use Rails-like database commands.

Locally, you can:

Drop your database:

rake db:drop

Create your database:

rake db:create

Migrate your database:

rake db:migrate

Create and migrate your database:

rake db:setup

On Heroku, you can:

Migrate your database:

heroku run rake db:migrate RACK_ENV=production

Resources

• The Grapes of Rapid - everything you need to know about Grape.
• Building high-performance (Ruby) web services - everything you need to know about Goliath.

Todo

• Unify all the 'require' statements.
• Make it work with databases other than PostgreSQL.
• Write some tests using the API.
• Add some example authentication.
• Add support for multiple environments e.g. test, development and production.