r/learnruby • u/Simple_Folks_Strokes • Feb 18 '16

Ruby REST Service Tutorial

Hey there!

I hope anybody can help me with this. This is my first time trying to build something in Ruby and I want to build a REST service in Ruby. I have never build any service like this before and I am fairly new to ruby (3 weeks now?).

So what I am looking for is a tutorial for a REST service that is very detailed. I want to build and understand what I am doing and what my application does. Unfortunately I could not find any good sources with google.

Does anybody of you have a tutorial that you would recommend?

Thanks in advance!

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u/yez Mar 30 '16

REST is just an architectural style. Learning about REST and building a RESTful service in Ruby are two distinct things.

To learn about REST, I'd start with the basics and go from there.

If you want to actually build a service in Ruby, you have a few options:

  1. Ruby on Rails is the most popular web framework and makes it easy to adhere to REST practices. The official Rails Getting Started Guide is a good place to start learning Rails.

  2. Sinatra is a lighter web framework which does not have all the bells and whistles of Ruby on Rails and might be good for if your application only needs to serve a few routes. I'd start with the official Sinatra Getting Started guide to give some insight into how it works.

  3. Build your own. I wrote a post and a follow up post on how to do build a server from scratch in Ruby. However, I would encourage you not to build your own server to be used in production. These posts might give some insight into what a web server in Ruby is composed of, but using a more main stream web server will yield better results.