Hackpipe

A unix pipe like interace for REST and streaming HTTP APIs.

TL;DR

Installation

Put bin/hackpipe into a directory that's in your PATH.
Copy samples/.hackpiperc to $HOME/.hackpiperc and modify it for your APIs

`~/.hackpiperc`

There is a sample ~/.hackpiperc included in the sample directory. This should give you a really good overview of what configuration options are available to you.

The top level apis key holds a hash of each api you wish to configure. The top level alternates is an array of alternate config files. This is to make it easy to have one api config per file. For example:

alternates:
 - ".hackpipe/campfire.yaml"  # A config file for the campfire API.  Paths are relative to `$HOME`
apis:
 github:
  # Config for the github API

The "alternate" config files have the same schema as .hackpiperc, except they do not support alternates.

Examples

These examples assume you are using the sample .hackpiperc

Read from the campfire stream:

hackpipe -a=campfire

Post a message to campfire:

echo "Hi Mark!" | hackpipe -a=campfire

Post a Gist to github, and filter the URL only out of the response:

hackpipe < test/github.json -a=github -o='puts JSON.parse(ARGF.read)["url"]'

[test/github.json]

{
  "description": "the description for this gist",
  "public": false,
  "files": {
    "file1.txt": {
      "content": "String file contents"
    }
  }
}

Commandline args override the .hackpiperc:

hackpipe -a=campfire -r='node' -o='
process.stdin.on("readable", function(chunk){
    chunk = process.stdin.read();
    if(!chunk){ return };
    console.log(chunk.toString().toUpperCase())
  })
'

The input script can modify the request by writing to some special files that are accessible through enviroment varables.

Using the query string global variable:

# the sample .hackpiperc file sets some common query string values for us
# we want to append a few more
hackpipe -a=cmm -e="File.open(ENV['QUERY'], 'a') { |q| q  << '&q=marinol' }"
# press ^D, we don't have any stdin to provide

Notes on Authorization

For the auth key in your ~/.hackpiperc hackpipe expects you to pre-compute any encoding. For example, many APIs use HTTP Basic auth. For those APIs your auth value would be the result of:

 "Basic " + base64encode("someusername" + ":" + "somepassword")

In otherwords, the value of auth will be set as the value of the Authorization header. This makes it easy for hackpipe to support digest, token and bearer auth as well.