[ruby-core:38502] [Ruby 1.9 - Feature #5064] HTTP user-agent class

Issue #5064 has been updated by Eric Hodel.


I have had discussions where people say "Net::HTTP's API is not very good" and people seem to want a better way to use Net::HTTP without trying out one of the many Net::HTTP::Agent-like extensions to the base API.

Having a recommended way to perform HTTP access in ruby will be useful to the community since they don't have to do any additional research.  Also users will be able perform basic HTTP requests for multiple servers and will gain the efficiencies of persistent connections without extra work.

The biggest issue people have is that they need to pass the host, port and SSL params for every HTTP connection made.  The nature of the API means that most people make a new connection for every request.  Since this is confusing for new users and annoying for experienced users I think it should be addressed in stdlib.

I think #2567 should be implemented in Net::HTTP itself.  After my tickets for the 1.9.3 release are finished I can port some code from mechanize to fix this.
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Feature #5064: HTTP user-agent class
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5064

Author: Eric Hodel
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: lib
Target version: 1.9.4


Currently there are some problems with Net::HTTP:

* Too many ways to use (user confusion)
* No automatic support for HTTPS (must conditionally set use_ssl)
* No automatic support for HTTPS peer verification (must be manually set)
* Single-connection oriented
* No support for redirect-following
* No support for HTTP/1.1 persistent connection retry (RFC 2616 8.1.4)
* No automatic support for HTTP proxies
* No automatic support for authentication (must be set per-request)

Additionally the style of the API of Net::HTTP makes it difficult to take advantage of persistent connections.  The user has to store the created connection and manually handle restarting the connection if it has timed out or is closed by the server.

RFC 2616 8.1.1 has a large section explaining the benefits of persistent connections, but while Net::HTTP implements persistent connections they could be easier for users to implement with next work.

I've implemented support for many of these additional features of Net::HTTP in various projects and I'd like Ruby to have the features required to make a useful HTTP user-agent built-in.

The agent should have the following responsibilities:
* Make or reuse connections based on [host, port, SSL enabled]
* Automatically enable SSL for https URIs
* Automatically enable SSL peer verification for SSL connections
* Limit number of persistent connections per host
* Follow redirects
* Retry when a persistent connection fails
* Automatically configure proxies
* Automatically use authentication
* Callbacks for various options connect

The agent may add the following responsibilities:
* Default headers for all requests
* HTTP cookies
* Tracking history
* Logging

I don't think any of these features are critical as they are implementable by users via callbacks.

The agent would have the following configurable items:
* Number of connections per host
* Depth of redirects followed
* Persistent connection retries (none, HTTP/1.1 (default), always)
* Proxy host, port, user, password

I think the class should be called Net::HTTP::Agent.

Basic use would look something like this:

  uris = [
    URI('http://example/1'),
    URI('http://example/2'),
    URI('https://secure.example'),
  ]

  agent = Net::HTTP::Agent.new

  uris.map do |uri|
    agent.get uri # Returns Net::HTTPResponse
  end

For special requests a Net::HTTPRequest could be constructed:

  req = Net::HTTP::Get.new uri.request_uri
  # do something special with req

  agent.request req

The agent should support GET, POST, etc. directly through API methods.  I think the API should look something like this:

  def get uri_or_string, query = nil, headers = nil
  # Same for other requests with no body
  #
  # query may be a Hash or String
  # How query param vs query string in URI is used is undecided

  def post uri_or_string, data, headers = nil
  # same for other requests with a body
  #
  # data may be a String, IO or Hash
  # How data format is chosen is undecided

SSL options, proxy options, timeouts and similar options should exist on Net::HTTP::Agent and be set on new connections as they are made.

I've implemented most of these features in mechanize as Mechanize::HTTP::Agent.  The Agent class in mechanize is bigger than is necessary and would need to be cut-down for inclusion in Ruby as Net::HTTP::Agent

https://github.com/tenderlove/mechanize/blob/master/lib/mechanize/http/agent.rb

Mechanize depends on net-http-persistent to provide HTTP/1.1 retry support and connection management:

https://github.com/drbrain/net-http-persistent/blob/master/lib/net/http/persistent.rb

Portions of net-http-persistent should be patches of Net::HTTP, for example #idempotent? #can_retry?, #reset and portions of #request.  Other parts (connection management) should be moved to Net::HTTP::Agent.

net-http-persistent provides a separate connection list per thread.  I would like Net::HTTP::Agent to be multi-thread friendly but implementing this in another way would be fine.

As an addendum, open-uri and mechanize should be written to take advantage of Net::HTTP::Agent on order to guide useful implementation.



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