gofer

gofer

A gofer, go-fer or gopher /ˈɡoʊfər/ is an employee who specializes in delivery of special items to their superior(s). The special items may be anything from a cup of coffee to a tailored suit or a car.

— Wikipedia: Gofer

npm install --save gofer

A base class to develop specialized ReST clients with. The general design is meant to enforce a certain level of consistency in how the clients are configured and instrumented. Uses request to do the actual fetching.

API docs • Walkthrough

Features

Options mappers

Option mappers are called in the order they are registered in and can potentially do anything they want. This can range from applying defaults over resolving custom api options to injecting access tokens.

By default only one option mapper is added which applies a base url if it's configured.

Defaults merging

All configuration is just defaults which is one of the things making option mappers so powerful. The precedence rules are (first wins):

1. Explicit configuration in the API call
2. Scoped overrides using client.with(options)
3. Endpoint-level defaults
4. Service-level defaults
5. Global defaults

See the walkthrough below for how these are configured.

Copy with defaults / scoped overrides

You can create a copy of the API with hard defaults using with. This enables a nice pattern:

// We'll assume MyApiClient has an option mapper than knows how to
// properly send an accessToken, e.g. using an Authentication header
var client = new MyApiClient(config);

// After retrieving an access token
var authenticatedClient = client.with({ accessToken: 'some-token' });

// This one will now send an access token
// ~> `curl -H 'Authentication: Bearer some-token' \
//          http://api.example.com/personal/some-id`
authenticatedClient.protectedResource('some-id', function(err, data) {});

// This one was not changed, so it will not send one
// ~> `curl http://api.example.com/personal/some-id`
client.protectedResource('some-id', function(err, data) {});

Instrumentation of start, connect, success, failure, and error

client.hub exposes the following events:

• start: A service call is attempted
• socketQueueing: Waiting for a socket. See http.globalAgent.maxSockets
• connect: Connected to the remote host, transfer may start
• fetchError: A transport error occured (e.g. timeouts)
• failure: An invalid status code was returned
• success: All went well

A hub can be shared across multiple gofer instances. You can find more details on what the log events look like in the API docs.

This sounds great, but...

Why not use service specific client libraries?

Well, in a way that's what gofer encourages. The difference is that by basing all client libraries on this one, you gain consistency and unified configuration. Creating a client for a new service often takes only a couple of lines.

Why not just use request directly?

If you have just one service to talk to or a handful endpoints that behave roughly the same, then this library is certainly overkill. But, if you want to easily manage configuration for different services including sane handling of endpoint-specific settings like differing timeouts, then you might end up reimplementing a lot of the things in here. Also, logging.

Walkthrough

Let's say we need a client for the Github API. The first step is to generate a Github client class:

var Gofer = require('gofer');
var util = require('util');

function Github() {
  Gofer.apply(this, arguments);
}
util.inherits(Github, Gofer);
Github.prototype.serviceName = 'github';
Github.prototype.serviceVersion = require('./package.json').version;

The name you choose here determines which section of the configuration it will accept. It's also part of the instrumentation as serviceName.

Let's define a simple endpoint to get the emojis from Github:

Github.prototype.registerEndpoints({
  // Every instance of Github will get an `emojis` property. On
  // access it will be initialized with an instrumented version of the
  // `request` function. The `request` function works mostly like mikeal's
  // `request`, though properties like `request.put` won't work.
  emojis: function(request) {
    // the value returned here will be what users see in `new Github().emojis`
    return function(cb) {
      // request(uri: string, options: object?, callback)
      return request('/emojis', cb);
    };
  }
});

To create an instance, we need to provide configuration. Configuration exists on three levels: global, per-service, and per-endpoint.

var config = {
  globalDefaults: {
    // these apply to all gofers
    connectTimeout: 30,
    timeout: 100
  },
  github: {
    // these apply for every call made with Github
    clientId: '<VALID CLIENT ID HERE>',
    endpointDefaults: {
      // these only apply for calls to the emojis endpoint
      emojis: {
        connectTimeout: 100,
        timeout: 2000
      }
    }
  }
};

To make our client a little nicer to use we'll add an option mapper that defaults baseUrl to the public Github API. The options we return will be passed on to request.

// Since the default option mapper would already try to apply a base url,
// we need to remove it.
Github.prototype.clearOptionMappers();
omit = require('lodash').omit;
Github.prototype.addOptionMapper(function(opts) {
  // opts contains the already merged options, including global-, service-,
  // and endpoint-defaults. In our example opts.uri will be '/emojis',
  // opts.timeout will be 2000, and opts.clientId... you get the idea.
  var baseUrl = opts.baseUrl || 'https://api.github.com';

  // `this` refers to the Github instance, applyBaseUrl is built-in
  // The default option mapper will just apply a base url if provided
  return this.applyBaseUrl(
    baseUrl,
    // it's a good practice to remove options you already handled
    omit(opts, 'baseUrl')
  );
});

Finally we can instantiate and make the call:

var github = new Github(config);
github.emojis().pipe(process.stdout);
// or, to get all the things
github.emojis(function(err, emojiList, stats, response) {
  if (err) throw err;
  console.log('It took %d seconds', stats.fetchDuration);
  console.log('Status code: %d', response.statusCode);
  console.log('Returned %d emojis', Object.keys(data).length);
});

You can check examples/github.js for a richer example.