gimmie-node

Gimmie Node.JS Module

This module is Gimmie Proxy for Node.js application which provide HTTP request handler function. It also embed simple server for use with Gimmie API if you don't want to add code to current application and want to configure reverse-proxy to point to Gimmie Proxy directly.

Installation

npm install gimmie-node

Standalone, streaming, reverse-proxy to Gimmie API server

gimmie-node comes with a standalone server that proxies all incoming request to the Gimmie API server. To run it, simply execute

npm start gimmie-node

This starts a node http.Server listening to port 8000 by default. You can customize the port using npm config

npm config set gimmie-node:port 3000
npm start gimmie-node

The proxy server should listen on port 3000 henceforth.

Web Frameworks

However, most likely you are already using some web frameworks and you'd like gimmie to proxy within your infrastructure.

In this case, you'd use gimmie-node like a library and instantiate a gimmie.ApiProxy object

var gimmie = require('gimmie-node');
var proxy = new ApiProxy({
	'cookie_key':   process.env['COOKIE_KEY'],
	'oauth_key':    process.env['OAUTH_KEY'],
	'oauth_secret': process.env['OAUTH_SECRET'],
	'url_prefix':  'https://api.gimmieworld.com'
});

You can now use proxy.proxy function as callback for anything that processes the http.ServerRequest and http.ServerResponse pair.

NOTE: the code above presumes your OAuth credentials and other config is stored as environment variables: COOKIE_KEY, OAUTH_KEY and OAUTH_SECRET

Express.JS

var app = express.createServer();
app.get('/gimmie/api', proxy.proxy.bind(proxy));
app.listen(8080);

Note that the actual path mounted does not matter, gimmie.ApiProxy can be mounted on any path

Connect

connect().use(proxy.proxy.bind(proxy)).listen(8080);

http.Server

require('http').createServer(proxy.proxy.bind(proxy)).listen(8080);

What's this proxy for?

Talking to Gimmie APIs from the server-side should not be an issue for most developers since the technology stack consists of standards like HTTP, OAuth and JSON.

However, client apps that run on the browser would have problems securing their OAuth credentials. The solution is to run a reverse proxy on your own infrastructure and have the client apps talk (without OAuth) to the OAuth configured reverse proxy (which would relay the request to api.gimmieworld.com and echo the response back to the browser)

Meaning, a browser request to

• http://www.yourserver.com/some/path?gimmieapi=/1/stores.json?hello=world would be forwarded to
• http://api.gimmieworld.com/1/stores.json?hello=world

When referencing the API documentation, simply replace the url prefix http://api.gimmieworld.com with your own reverse proxy url. Everything will still apply as-is.