Vape (is a Work in Progress)

The functional web micro-framework!

About

What does it do?

It helps you structure your code into units that handle HTTP web requests. Each of these are called handlers. They can then be compiled and deployed individually, or linked to a router and deployed together.

Why would you want to do that?

This structure opens up some opportunities. Individual handlers can run in their own lambda function or similar serverless environment. You can have quick deploys of individual handlers or do checksum diffing to deploy only ones that have changed. In more advanced cases you could group handlers together and scale groups vertically or horizontally to accommodate your traffic.

Okay, but that leaves a lot for me to do.

That is not a question, but yes. Vape will try to bring all the tools together to help you route handlers, develop locally and compile handlers in the configuration of your choosing.

Getting Started

Install V

You'll need v available globally so follow the instructions here.

git clone https://github.com/vlang/v
cd v
make
sudo ./v symlink

Install Vape

Vape is packaged as a V module for now, so you can install it with:

v install exastencil.vape

This will clone the repository into ~/.vmodules/exastencil/vape.

This repository contains library code needed to compile Vape apps and a command line utility to help you build and run them.

Install the CLI

First you need to build it:

v ~/.vmodules/exastencil/vape/commands/vape.v

This will build the executable at ~/.vmodules/exastencil/vape/commands/vape.

I'd recommend moving it onto your path with something like:

mv ~/.vmodules/exastencil/vape/commands/vape /usr/local/bin

where /usr/local/bin could be anywhere on your path.

To test that the CLI is working try vape and it should output help.

Start a project

To start a new project simply create an empty folder and execute vape init within it.

This sets up a basic file structure and a sample handler to get you started.

Add as many endpoints as you need. endpoints/hello.v should have been provided as an example.

To run the all endpoints in a web server in your local environment run vape dev in the root of your project.

➜ vape dev
🔪 Dissecting handlers…
   ↜ endpoints/hello.v

🧠 Compiling development server…
🚀 Launching development server on port 6789… Ctrl + C to exit.

Visit http://localhost:6789/hello to see it in action.

Planned Features

Dynamic routing for local development
Named route parameters and query parameters
Host context
Standardized logging
Built-in benchmarking
Hot code reloading for local development
Individual endpoint compilation
Build checksums

And some longer term, bigger picture features…

Deployment helper as in vape deploy
Entity persistence
Scheduled handlers (cron-like handlers)
Messaging handlers (e.g. email)

Author

Exa Stencil

Acknowledgements

Vape is made possible by the V language. Where possible it relies on its standard library, and even where it isn't it is usually used as a reasonable starting point.

Vape is a side-project to which very little time is dedicated. The best way to support Vape is to support V.