Patron is a Ruby HTTP client library based on libcurl. It does not try to expose the full "power" (read complexity) of libcurl but instead tries to provide a sane API while taking advantage of libcurl under the hood.

Usage

First, you instantiate a Session object. You can set a few default options on the Session instance that will be used by all subsequent requests:

sess = Patron::Session.new
sess.timeout = 10
sess.base_url = "http://myserver.com:9900"
sess.headers['User-Agent'] = 'myapp/1.0'

You can set options with a hash in the constructor:

sess = Patron::Session.new({ :timeout => 10,
                             :base_url => 'http://myserver.com:9900',
                             :headers => {'User-Agent' => 'myapp/1.0'} } )

Or the set options in a block:

sess = Patron::Session.new do |patron|
    patron.timeout = 10
    patron.base_url = 'http://myserver.com:9900'
    patron.headers = {'User-Agent' => 'myapp/1.0'}
end

Output debug log:

sess.enable_debug "/tmp/patron.debug"

The Session is used to make HTTP requests.

resp = sess.get("/foo/bar")

Requests return a Response object:

if resp.status < 400
  puts resp.body
end

The GET, HEAD, PUT, POST and DELETE operations are all supported.

sess.put("/foo/baz", "some data")
sess.delete("/foo/baz")

You can ship custom headers with a single request:

sess.post("/foo/stuff", "some data", {"Content-Type" => "text/plain"})

Threading

By itself, the Patron::Session objects are not thread safe (each Session holds a single curl_state pointer during the request/response cycle). At this time, Patron has no support for curl_multi_* family of functions for doing concurrent requests. However, the actual code that interacts with libCURL does unlock the RVM GIL, so using multiple Session objects in different threads is possible with a high degree of concurrency. For sharing a resource of sessions between threads we recommend using the excellent connection_pool gem by Mike Perham.

patron_pool = ConnectionPool.new(size: 5, timeout: 5) { Patron::Session.new }
patron_pool.with do |session|
  session.get(...)
end

Requirements

You need a recent version of libcurl in order to install this gem. On MacOS X the provided libcurl is sufficient. You will have to install the libcurl development packages on Debian or Ubuntu. Other Linux systems are probably similar. Windows users are on your own. Good luck with that.

Installation

sudo gem install patron

Copyright (c) 2008 The Hive