Strapi

Strapi is an Open source Node.js Headless CMS to easily build customizable APIs. It’s great for quickly building your data layer alongside a UI to manage it.

Say you (like me) like to quickly build sites and applications in Ruby and/or/on Rails. The goal of the Strapi gem is to make it just as easy to define Ruby classes that represent and interact with your Strapi content types as it is to define them within Strapi itself.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'strapi'

Or if you want to run the absolute latest, potentially unreleased version:

gem 'strapi', github: 'waymondo/strapi-ruby'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Usage

Note: this gem has only been tested with Strapi v4. It may work with previous versions of Strapi, but they remain untested at this time.

Configuration

You will first need to set an ENV variable for STRAPI_HOST_URL, STRAPI_IDENTIFIER and STRAPI_PASSWORD. This can be done with dotenv, in an initializer, or some other mechanism.

If using dotev, your .env file would contain:

STRAPI_HOST_URL=http://localhost:1337
STRAPI_IDENTIFIER=admin@example.com
STRAPI_PASSWORD=password

The STRAPI_IDENTIFIER and STRAPI_PASSWORD should be the login information for a user with a role that grants access to your authenticated content. Strapi Authenticated request documentation

Upon running the first method that interacts with the Strapi API, a JWT token will be fetched and cached.

Defining Content Type Classes

In Ruby, define some content type classes, i.e.:

class Farm < Strapi::ContentType
  field :name
  field :cows, content_type: 'Cow'
  field :photo, content_type: 'Strapi::Media'
end

class Cow < Strapi::ContentType
  field :name
  field :farm, content_type: 'Farm'
end

Using the field class method will define getter and setter methods for the class objects. If you supply a class name to the content_type option, it will transform it to an instance of that class when using the getter method. This works for both one-to-one and one-to-many relations:

cow.name # => "Hershey"
cow.farm # => #<Farm>
farm.name # => "McDonald’s"
farm.cows # => [#<Cow>, #<Cow>]

In keeping with ruby conventions, attribute keys returned from your Strapi API will be underscored, so if you have an attribute of "colorPattern": "jersey" in your JSON, your field definition should be field :color_pattern.

Strapi::Media is an included content type class to represent photos, videos, and files. Feel free to extend this class if you would like to add additional functionality or granularity.

farm.photo # => #<Strapi::Media>
farm.photo.url # => "http://localhost:1337/uploads/farm-1.jpg"

By default, Strapi::ContentType will infer it’s API plural id from the demodulized, dasherized, pluralized name of the ruby class. For example, it would assume a class of FarmWorker would have a Strapi plural ID of farm-workers. If you would like to customize this, you can set it in the class definition:

class FarmWorker
  plural_id 'farmers'
end

Fetching Entries

Strapi::ContentType provides some predictable methods for retrieving entries from your Strapi API:

Cow.all # => [#<Cow>, #<Cow>, #<Cow>]
cow = Cow.find(1)
cow.id # => 1

Both .all and .find accept a hash of options that map to Strapi’s allowed API parameters. No parameter options are included by default, so if you want to eagerly load related content types for example, you’ll need to specify that with the populate option:

cows = Cow.all(populate: '*')
cows.first.farm.name # => "McDonald’s"
farm = Farm.find(1, populate: ['cows'])
farm.cows.first.name # => "Hershey"

The class method .where also exists, which is the same implementation as .all, except a hash of API parameters is required.

cows = Cow.where(filters: { name: { '$eq': 'Hershey' } })

Creating, Updating, Deleting

You can create and update entries by calling .save on them:

cow = Cow.new(name: 'Hershey')
cow.id # => nil
cow.save # => performs POST request
cow.id # => 1
cow = Cow.find(1)
cow.name = 'Bessie'
cow.save # => performs PUT request

You can also use create class method to more concisely create entries:

cow = Cow.create(name: 'Bessie')
cow.id # => 1

You can delete entries by calling .delete on them:

cow = Cow.find(1)
cow.delete # => performs DELETE request
cow = Cow.find(1) # => raises Strapi::Error

Error Handling

Any non successful Strapi request will raise a Strapi::Error with the API response’s status, message, and payload, which you can rescue and handle accordingly:

def show
  cow = Cow.find(123)
  render :cow, cow: cow
rescue Strapi::Error => e
  render :error, message: e.message
end

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/waymondo/strapi-ruby.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.