Mu

Minimalistic HTTP Requests library via async / await

What is this?

Making HTTP API requests in Swift using Foundation can be verbose and use a mix of types like URL, URLComponents and URLRequest to form a request and then handling all the encoding and decoding steps later. While this code is not very complicated in can become extremely repetitive especially when writing requests by hand.

The goal of this Swift Package is to provide an extremely minimaistic lightweight abstraction layer between the user and the repetitive and verbose nature of Foundation to write HTTP requests.

Mu allows the user to declare a request with it's body and headers up front along side its other details like endpoint to improve code readability and eliminate the boilerplate that comes with rolling HTTP requests send with URLSession.

Installation

Going forward Swift Package Manager seems like it will replace Carthage and CocoaPods and since SPM is baked into Xcode why not?

To install Mu via SPM in Xcode go to File -> Add Packages... and enter https://github.com/nirma/mu

Basic Usage

Mu is very simple as there are only two parts to it being a request that conforms to HTTPRequest and the Requester that is used to send the request.

GET Request

        let request = Request(
            scheme: .https,
            host: "api.github.com",
            path: "/users/nirma",
            method: .get,
            headers: ["Accept": "application/vnd.github.v3+json"]
        )
        
        let requester = Requester(decoder: JSONDecoder())

        Task {
            do {
                let (user, response) = try await requester.send(
                    request: request,
                    expect: ExpectedResponse.self // A `Decodable` type that is the expected response
                )
                ...
            } catch { ... }
        }

POST Request

POST requests specify the body in terms of HTTPBody. HTTPBody can either be raw Data or a type that conforms to Swifts Encodable`.

        let body = [
            "username": "foobar42",
            "email": "foobar42@github.com",
            "password_hash": "34973274ccef6ab4dfaaf86599792fa9c3fe4689"
        ]
        
        let request = Request(
            scheme: .https,
            host: "example.com",
            path: "/user/create",
            method: .post,
            headers: ["Content-Type": "application/json"],
            body: HTTPBody(body)
        )
        
        let requester = Requester(decoder: JSONDecoder())

        Task {
            do {
                let (user, response) = try await requester.send(
                    request: request,
                    expect: ExpectedResponse.self // A `Decodable` type that is the expected response
                )
                ...
            } catch { ... }
        }
        

Making requests with HTTPRequest

HTTPRequest is a protocol that all requests in this library must confrom to. Included in this library is a simple class Request that implements this protocol and is purely included just for convenience please feel free to implement your own types conforming to HTTPRequest or use or subclass Request if it suits your needs.

Sending requests with HTTPRequester

Simply construct a type conforming to HTTPRequester and use the send(request:expect) method to send your request. The response will be converted to the type specified by the expect parameter and an exception will be thrown if conversion fails.

Requester comes out of the box and accepts any type for decoding that conforms to AbstractDecoder default conformance has been applied to JSONDecoder so for requests expecting JSON responses simply pass in JSONDecoder:

let requester = Requester(decoder: JSONDecoder())

If JSONDecoder is not the right tool to get the job done then simply confrom the type you wish to use to AbstractDecoder and pass it in!

License

This library is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.