Read The Docs Carefully

Continuing with my Ruby language learning journey, I wanted to use it for more than Hello world.

So I decided to try python’s request equivalent.

Since I didn’t know where to begin, I just searched for requests on RubyGems

Turns out Gem by the exact name exists and with description Because Requests for Python is awesome 🤗 But it isn’t updated in close to 5 years now.

I also wanted to use something native (i.e. not ported from other languages - although nothing wrong with that)

Initially I tried net/http from the standard library.

Several people had already suggested Faraday by then. So that is what I chose.

The code was straight forward, yet it kept failing.

I asked for help on the Telegram group, but people kept suggesting based on their hunch, without reading the code I had shared.¹

I know it is not SO, so I shouldn’t expect too much, still when one feels stuck and other’s suggestions aren’t useful, one feels frustrated 🤷‍

Finally, I decided to dig deep (I thought I had already done that, but I guess not 😄)

Turns out when you create a connection, you only specify the server in the connection object, and specify the path when you make a request. Makes sense looking back. (I had specified the entire URL, including the path)

Second most important one was, and related to the first one, or because of the first one, I specified 'get' as param to conn.get() It is copy/paste from the Usage page of Faraday documentation.

I assumed 'get' string tells the connection to GET the URL. (Looking back, if we are already using conn.get, why would we specify string 'get' again. But .. 🤷‍) Reason I thought that because I had already specified the path in connection.

The problem was I kept getting HTML output, when I asked for json. I thought that was the problem 😆

It wasn’t until I decided to dig down the rabbit hole and reached this page I realized what may be the actual problem.

Here, they are passing 'json' to conn.get. That can’t be right, because they are already specifying f.response :json in Faraday.new

This is when I went to actual http://httpbingo.org and noticed that json is a page that returns JSON response. 💡

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t copy/paste blindly
• Don’t assume URLs are placeholders (Most times they are, until they are not)
• Think! (This happened late, but better late than never 😄)