Sinatra-REST

Actually it’s a set of templates to introduce RESTful routes in Sinatra. The only thing for you to do is to provide the views. The routes and some url helpers will be provided behind the scenes.

Installation

Guess what!

sudo gem source —add http://gems.github.com sudo gem install blindgaenger-sinatra-rest

Usage

Of course you need to require the gem in your Sinatra application:

require ‘rubygems’ require ‘sinatra’ require ‘sinatra/rest’

It’s very similar to defining routes in Sinatra (get, post, …). But this time you don’t define the routes by yourself, but use the model’s name for convention.

For example, if the model’s class is called Person you only need to add this line:

rest Person

Which will add the following RESTful routes to your application. (Note the pluralization of Person to the /people/* routes.)

• GET /people
• GET /people/new
• POST /people
• GET /people/:id
• GET /people/:id/edit
• PUT /people/:id
• DELETE /people/:id

But the real benefit is, that these routes define a restful standard behaviour on your model, appropriate routing and redirecting and named url helpers.

For instance, you can imagine the following code to be added for the /people and /people/:id routes.

# simply add this line

rest Person, :renderer => :erb

# and this is generated for you

get '/people' do
  @people = Person.all
  erb :"people/index", options
end

put '/people/:id' do
  @person = Person.find_by_id(params[:id])
  redirect url_for_people_show(@person), 'person updated'
end

# further restful routes for Person ...

That’s only half the truth! The routes are generated dynamically, so all defaults can be overridden (the behaviour, after/before callbacks, used renderer, which routes are added).

For more details and options, please have a look at the pages in the Sinatra-REST Wiki on Github.

Contact

You can contact me via mail at blindgaenger at gmail dot com, or leave me a message on my Github profile.