Norwegian Rubyist August Lilleaas has been busy putting together a ton of examples of using the Net::HTTP Ruby library that comes with most Ruby distributions. I asked him if it'd be okay to put some of them directly on Ruby Inside for reference purposes and he said "No problem!"
It's worth noting that Net::HTTP has been superseded in many areas by libraries like John Nunemaker's HTTParty and Paul DIx's high performance Typhoeus, but as part of the standard library, Net::HTTP is still a popular option though it doesn't have the easiest API to remember.
Here's a selection of August's examples for some of the most common operations. Want to see all of the examples and follow any updates made to them? Check out August's net-http-cheat-sheet GitHub repo.
Standard HTTP Request
require "net/http"
require "uri"
uri = URI.parse("http://google.com/")
# Shortcut
response = Net::HTTP.get_response(uri)
# Will print response.body
Net::HTTP.get_print(uri)
# Full
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
response = http.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri))
Basic Auth
require "net/http"
require "uri"
uri = URI.parse("http://google.com/")
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
request.basic_auth("username", "password")
response = http.request(request)
Dealing with response objects
require "net/http"
require "uri"
uri = URI.parse("http://google.com/")
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
response = http.request(request)
response.code # => 301
response.body # => The body (HTML, XML, blob, whatever)
# Headers are lowercased
response["cache-control"] # => public, max-age=2592000
POST form request
require "net/http"
require "uri"
uri = URI.parse("http://example.com/search")
# Shortcut
response = Net::HTTP.post_form(uri, {"q" => "My query", "per_page" => "50"})
# Full control
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri.request_uri)
request.set_form_data({"q" => "My query", "per_page" => "50"})
response = http.request(request)
File upload - input type="file" style
require "net/http"
require "uri"
# Token used to terminate the file in the post body. Make sure it is not
# present in the file you're uploading.
BOUNDARY = "AaB03x"
uri = URI.parse("http://something.com/uploads")
file = "/path/to/your/testfile.txt"
post_body = []
post_body "--#{BOUNDARY}\r\n"
post_body "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"datafile\"; filename=\"#{File.basename(file)}\"\r\n"
post_body "Content-Type: text/plain\r\n"
post_body "\r\n"
post_body File.read(file)
post_body "\r\n--#{BOUNDARY}--\r\n"
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri.request_uri)
request.body = post_body.join
request["Content-Type"] = "multipart/form-data, boundary=#{BOUNDARY}"
http.request(request)
SSL/HTTPS request
require "net/https"
require "uri"
uri = URI.parse("https://secure.com/")
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
http.use_ssl = true
http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
response = http.request(request)
response.body
response.status
response["header-here"] # All headers are lowercase
SSL/HTTPS request with PEM certificate
require "net/https"
require "uri"
uri = URI.parse("https://secure.com/")
pem = File.read("/path/to/my.pem")
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
http.use_ssl = true
http.cert = OpenSSL::X509::Certificate.new(pem)
http.key = OpenSSL::PKey::RSA.new(pem)
http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
REST methods
# Basic REST.
# Most REST APIs will set semantic values in response.body and response.code.
require "net/http"
http = Net::HTTP.new("api.restsite.com")
request = Net::HTTP::Post.new("/users")
request.set_form_data({"users[login]" => "quentin"})
response = http.request(request)
# Use nokogiri, hpricot, etc to parse response.body.
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new("/users/1")
response = http.request(request)
# As with POST, the data is in response.body.
request = Net::HTTP::Put.new("/users/1")
request.set_form_data({"users[login]" => "changed"})
response = http.request(request)
request = Net::HTTP::Delete.new("/users/1")
response = http.request(request)
There are more in August's repo if you want to keep browsing..
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