“rack is to reck as snake is to snek”

Reck

The exception-powered Ruby web framework!

Brought to you by Honeybadger.io: Zero-instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradation. Deploy with confidence and be your team’s devops hero!

Why another framework?

Reck is very light-weight compared to other Ruby web frameworks such as Rails and Sinatra. We handle only the routing and middleware layers using Ruby’s built-in exception system to raise requests to the client. Flow control in Ruby has never been easier.

Seriously?

No, lol. Reck is a joke. It’s an example of what not to do. Using exceptions for flow control is bad for a number of reasons:

It makes your code more difficult to read and understand
There are better alternatives (such as catch/throw)
It makes Ruby slower

With the disclaimers out of the way, let’s make some bad decisions!

Installation

$ gem install reck

Usage

To respond to the defined route with rendered content, simply raise an exception. The message of the exception will be evaluated as ERB before being added to the response. If the exception is raised without a message, a no-content response will be sent.

Routing is as simple as:

Reck.route '/' do |request|
  raise Reck::Ok, 'Hello World'
end

Want to add authentication? No problem.

Reck.route '/admin' do |request|
  raise Reck::Forbidden unless request.params['username'] == 'admin'
  raise Reck::Forbidden unless request.params['password'] == 'secret'
  raise Reck::Ok, 'Super secret admin page'
end

The message of each exception is actually a template. Use ERB tags to interpolate Ruby values in your views:

Reck.route '/version' do |request|
  raise Reck::Ok, 'Reck version: <%= Reck::VERSION %>'
end

Reck depends on Rack. You also have access to helper methods derived from the keys in Rack’s env hash:

Reck.route '/method' do |request|
  raise Reck::Ok, 'Requested via: <%= request_method %>'
end

To run the application server:

$ ruby -r reck application.rb

Supported Responses

Each response inherits from the exception Reck::Response.

Exception Class	Status code
Reck::Ok	200
Reck::Created	201
Reck::Forbidden	403
Reck::NotFound	404

Handling Exceptions

While responses should always be raised, you may wish to handle other types of unexpected exceptions, or “exceptional exceptions”. In these cases, use Honeybadger. Honeybadger provides middleware (and a bunch of other cool features) to monitor Ruby applications – whether you’re using Reck, Rails, Sinatra, Rack, or rolling your own Ruby web-framework.

To monitor Reck for exceptions:

# application.rb
require 'honeybadger'
require 'reck'

Honeybadger.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = 'your_api_key'
  config.report_data = true
  config.exceptions.ignore = [Reck::Response]
end

use Honeybadger::Rack::ErrorNotifier

Reck.route '/oops' do |request|
  fail 'oops!'
end

Run the server:

$ ruby application.rb

Don’t forget to replace 'your_api_key' with the API key from your project settings page in Honeybadger.

Contributing

Fork it.
Create a topic branch git checkout -b my_branch
Commit your changes git commit -am "Boom"
Push to your branch git push origin my_branch
Send a pull request

Meet Reck