Introduction

Suave is a simple web development F# library providing a lightweight web server and a set of combinators to manipulate route flow and task composition. Suave is inspired in the simplicity of Happstack and born out of the necessity of embedding web server capabilities in my own applications. Suave supports Websocket, HTTPS, multiple TCP/IP bindings, Basic Access Authentication, Keep-Alive.

Suave also takes advantage of F# asynchronous workflows to perform non-blocking IO. In fact, Suave is written in a completely non-blocking fashion throughout.

Build Status

Platform	Status
Linux

What follows is a tutorial on how to create applications. Scroll past the tutorial to see detailed function documentation.

Tutorial: Hello World!

The simplest Suave application is a simple HTTP server that greets all visitors with the string "Hello World!"

open Suave

startWebServer defaultConfig (Successful.OK "Hello World!")

Now that you've discovered how to do "Hello World!", go read the rest of the documentation – editable in the docs folder.

Suave.Testing

We have a NuGet ready for your testing needs; Suave is an excellent server for running in-process integration tests, as it's very fast to spawn. On an ordinary laptop, running hundreds of randomized tests and micro-benchmarks as well as all Suave unit tests, take about 5 seconds on mono.

Start by installing:

paket add nuget suave.testing

You can now use it:

open Suave
open Suave.Testing
open Expecto

testCase "parsing a large multipart form" <| fun _ ->

  let res =
    runWithConfig (OK "hi")
    |> req HttpMethod.POST "/" (Some byteArrayContent)

  Expect.equal res "hi" "Should get the correct result"

All of our tests use this assembly; you can do too.

How to Build

To execute the build script, invoke following command on the Linux or MacOs console:

./build.sh

Or in the Microsoft Windows MSDOS console:

build

Coding Guidelines

Suave.X where X is a module is where we expect users to look. We don't expect users of the library to have to look at Y in Suave.X.Y, so for server-specific code, please stick to the Y module/namespace. That way we make the API discoverable.

Style Guide

Two space indentation.

match x with // '|' characters at base of 'match'
| A     -> ()
| Bcdef -> "aligned arrows" // space after '|' character

Parameters

Let type annotations be specified with spaces after the argument symbol and before the type.

module MyType =
  let ofString (scheme : string) =
    // ...

Method formatting with no spaces after/before normal parenthesis

let myMethodName firstArg (second : WithType) = async { // and monad builder
  return! f firstArg second
  } // at base of 'let' + 2 spaces

You need to document your methods with '///' to create inline documentation. This documentation is used for two purposes. First, to automatically generate on-line API documentation. Second, to generate an XML documentation file to be included in the NuGet package, so that users of the library can understand the intention behind a method easily.

Don't put unnecessary parenthesis unless it makes the code more clear.

When writing functions that take some sort of 'configuration' or that you can imagine would like to be called with a parameter which is almost always the same value for another function body's call-site, put that parameter before more-often-varying parameters in the function signature.

Building the website

Run the following in the docs directory. It requires Ruby installed.

# you may need to delete `Gemfile.lock` if your local Ruby version differs.
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll build

To generate the API documentation, run the following in the project root directory

packages\docs\FsLibTool\tools\FsLibTool.exe src docs\_site

Testing

Run Tests as a console app. Return status code = 0 means success.

Upgrade openssl

Windows: paket update openssl.redist

OS X: brew install openssl && brew update openssl && cp /usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.1j_1/lib/ .

SuaveIO/suave