Gimmie Rack Library

This gem is Rack application to provide a reverse proxy for Gimmie REST API

Installation

gem install gimmie

If you are using bundler, add this into your Gemfile

gem "gimmie"

Configuration

Gimmie Proxy library prefers configuration to be set as environment variables

GIMMIE_OAUTH_KEY
GIMMIE_OAUTH_SECRET
GIMMIE_COOKIE_KEY
GIMMIE_URL_PREFIX

In this way, the Gimmie::Proxy object can be simply initialized as

Gimmie::Proxy.new

Alternatively, configuration can be set as constructor arguments, e.g.

Gimmie::Proxy.new({
    cookie_key: '_gm_key',
    oauth_key: 'onetwothree',
    oauth_secret: 'fourfivesix',
    url_prefix: 'https://api.gimmieworld.com',
})

Rack

Create a file config.ru with the following code

require 'gimmie'
run Gimmie::Proxy.new

Next, execute the command

rackup

This will run a web server on port 9292. You can test by sending a HTTP request, e.g.

curl -i 'http://localhost:9292/gimmieapi=/1/rewards.json'

If your GIMMIE_URL_PREFIX is https://api.gimmieworld.com, then an OAuth request will sent to https://api.gimmieworld.com/1/rewards.json and the response will be echoed back

Rails

To add Gimmie Proxy into your existing Rails application, simply provide a route in your config/routes.rb file, e.g.

match "/gimmie_proxy" => Gimmie::Proxy.new

You can test by sending a HTTP request, e.g.

curl -i 'http://localhost:3000/gimmie_proxy?gimmieapi=/1/rewards.json?x=y'

NOTE: the mount path can be anything, Gimmie Proxy does not care; it only looks for the gimmieapi= string and ignore everything that comes before.

If your GIMMIE_URL_PREFIX is https://api.gimmieworld.com, then an OAuth request will sent to https://api.gimmieworld.com/1/rewards.json?x=y and the response will be echoed back

What's this proxy for?

Talking to Gimmie APIs from the server-side should not be an issue for most developers since the technology stack consists of standards like HTTP, OAuth and JSON.

However, client apps that run on the browser would have problems securing their OAuth credentials. The solution is to run a reverse proxy on your own infrastructure and have the client apps talk (without OAuth) to the OAuth configured reverse proxy (which would relay the request to api.gimmieworld.com and echo the response back to the browser)

Meaning, a browser request to

• http://www.yourserver.com/some/path?gimmieapi=/1/stores.json?hello=world would be forwarded to
• http://api.gimmieworld.com/1/stores.json?hello=world

When referencing the API documentation, simply replace the url prefix http://api.gimmieworld.com with your own reverse proxy url. Everything will still apply as-is.