Raiden

raiden is a CLI built on top of the node request module and is designed for interacting with http servers. raiden is useful for development, testing and debugging. With some simple configs raiden allows you to execute http requests without the overhead of jumping into a browser or fiddling with curl.

Why

raiden can drastically speed up your workflow when working with http servers with features like:

• Tabbed autocompletion.
• Dynamic request payloads from static configs. No more manual changing of the request payload between requests.
• Cookie Jar out of the box. Cookies are persisted and used in subsequent requests.
• Easy to define requests. raiden does the heavy lifting.

Table of contents

• Installation
• Getting Started
• Using Multiple Request Configs
• Example Request Definitions
  • Simple GET Request
  • Forms
  • Json
  • Custom Headers
  • Http Authentication
  • TLS/SSL Protocol
  • Dynamic Request Payloads
• Additional Tips

Installation

npm install -g raiden

To enable tab-completion for bash, add the following to your .bashrc script:

which raiden > /dev/null && . "$( raiden initpath )"

Getting started

On install, a hidden .raiden folder will have been created in your home directory containing several files.

~/.raiden/envs.yml

Hostnames are stored ~/.raiden/envs.yml as key/value. You can also define a default host to be used for when no host is provided to raiden. An example config looks like so:

# ~/.raiden/envs.yml

default: 127.0.0.1:8888
staging: staging.localhost.com:8888

NOTE: Do not include the protocol in the host definition. raiden will use http protocol by default for all requests. If you want to use https set the protocol property in your request definition to https.

~/.raiden/requests.yml

API request definitions are stored in ~/.raiden/requests.yml. A simple example config with one request defined looks like so:

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

get_posts:
    endpoint: posts

--

Using the above two example configs, we could then execute an API request with:

$ raiden request -e staging get_posts

This would issue a GET request to http://staging.localhost.com:8888/posts

Multiple requests can be given to raiden request at the same time as arguments:

raiden request -e staging request1 request2 request3 ...

Use raiden --help to learn more about raidens exec options and commands.

Using multiple request configs

raiden supports multiple request definition config files. If you are working with multiple API's and you wish to segregate the request definitions at the API level to different files, simply create additional .yml config files in the ~/.raiden directory.

You can then tell raiden which config file to use for request definitions using the raiden config command with the --set option:

$ raiden config --set reqfile acme_api_requests.yml

raiden will then use ~/.raiden/acme_api_requests.yml for the request definitions.

You can confirm the file that's currently being used for request definitions by executing:

$ raiden config --list
reqfile:acme_api_requests.yml

Example Request Definitions

raiden endeavours to support most of the node request library API which it is built on top of by way of request-promise. raiden will pass nearly all request config props transparently through to the request lib unchanged. The notable exceptions are detailed below (filepath values being transformed where applicable in forms/agent options etc). As such it is helpful to consult the node request library docs if you are looking to do something with a request that is not detailed in the following examples.

Simple GET Request

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

get_posts:
    endpoint: posts
    method: GET
    qs:             
        rpp: 10
        page: 2

With this config raiden request get_posts would execute a GET request to default host:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/posts/?rrp=10&page=2

--

Forms

raiden supports application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data form uploads.

application/x-www-form-urlencoded (URL-Encoded forms)

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

url_encoded_form_request:
    endpoint: form
    method: POST
    form:
        foo: bar
        baz: qux

multipart/form-data (Multipart form uploads)

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

multipart_form_request:
    endpoint: upload
    method: POST
    formData:
        my_field: value 
        file_1: test.txt # this path will be read relative to the .raiden directory
        file_2: /absolute/path/to/img.png # you can also provide absolute paths

If you provide a file path as a value, raiden will take care of grabbing binary data needed for the request. Any other values will be left unchanged.

--

Json

Defining a POST request with a json payload is simple:

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

json_request:
    endpoint: posts
    method: POST
    body:
        author: W. Whitman
        title: Leaves of Grass
        text: A blade of grass is the journeywork of the stars...
    json: true # let raiden know we want to POST as json

--

Custom Headers

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

get_posts:
    endpoint: posts
    method: GET
    headers: 
        User-Agent: raiden

--

HTTP Authentication

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

login:
    protocol: https
    endpoint: login
    auth:
        username: username
        password: password
        sendImmediately: false

See the request library for more information on this configration.

--

TLS/SSL Protocol

A request that utilises a self signed SSL cert:

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

login:
    protocol: https
    endpoint: login
    agentOptions:
        ca: /path/to/ca.cert.pem

See the request library for more information on this configration.

--

Dynamic request payloads

raiden allows you to generate dynamic payload data from your static request config using the transforms prop.

It achieves this by integrating with the fantastic chance library to generate the data. A good use case example for a transform would be if you wanted to interact with a user registration API endpoint and it required a unique username in the payload of every request. Rather than manually altering the payload everytime you execute the request, you can use a transform like so:

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

register:
    method: POST
    endpoint: register
    body:
        username: placeholder # raiden will replace this value
        password: password
    json: true
    transforms:
        - transform: 
            method: string
            args: 
                length: 10
            prefix: hans_gruber
          key: username # execute transform on the username value of the payload

The above transform would change the Json POST body of the register request to something like:

{
    username: "hans_gruber_hkJ983jFn5"
    password: "password"
}

raiden transforms can also handle generating dynamic values for nested payload props. We just need to specify the path to the prop using a period '.' seperator to delineate the nested object keys:

# ~/.raiden/requests.yml

register:
    method: POST
    endpoint: register
    body:
        data:
            username: placeholder # raiden will replace this value 
            password: password
    json: true
    transforms:
        - transform: 
            method: string
            args: 
                length: 10
            prefix: hans_gruber
          key: data.username 

transforms API

• transforms - array of transform objects.
  • transform - object describing the transform.
    • method - the method to call in the chance library to generate the new value.
    • args - object of arguments to pass to the chance libary method.
    • prefix - optional string to prepend to the generated value.
    • suffix - optional string to append to the generated value.
  • key - string specifying the property in the request payload that will be transformed.

Check out the chance library docs for what's possible with the data generation.

Additional Tips

Autocomplete by default requires you to hit tab twice if there are multiple possible matches for the input. This annoying. I would highly suggest putting the following into your ~/.inputrc for a nicer autocomplete experience:

set show-all-if-ambiguous on

License

MIT