Vaquero is a system designed to make it trivially easy to add a REST interface to an existing Erlang OTP system. With that in mind it provides the ability to trivially design REST routes and call into your system to produce values. It also has the ability to handle default encoding and decoding of json values and efficient route dispatching.

Vaquero is designed to be a very thin layer on top of cowboy. The request object you get is a simple cowboy request object and can be interacted with via the normal cowboy api.

Your route should return one of the following values.

• A cowboy request object already setup with correct return values
• An output object, either as a binary, iolist, or jiffy json object
• A tuple of output and status where output is as above and status is the HTTP status code to return.
• A tuple of output (as described above), standard cowboy headers and status (as described above)

Vaquero supports the following HTTP methods

• GET
• HEAD
• PUT
• PATCH
• POST
• DELETE
• OPTIONS

Vaquero's Routes are the same as Cowboy's routes and are documented here. Vaquero does not yet support host routes, only path routes.

When you specify a variable in a route that becomes a variable in the body of your handler. If you are not going to use that variable for some reason you need to hide it as below.

get "/one/two/:three", hide: [three], req: req do
  {[{:unsupported, "three is not used anywhere"}]}
end

Vaquero supports direct access to the req parameter of the cowboy request, but you need to supply a name for it if you want to use it. Otherwise it will be hidden from you.

defmodule RestRouter do
    use Vaquero

    get "/", content_type: :json do
     {[{:woot, ["I", "am", "a", "valid", "json", "value"]}]}
    end

    get "/", content_type: :html, req: req do
      "HTMLs should return a binary or io list"
    end
 end

Elixir                        JSON            Elixir
==========================================================================

:null                      -> null           -> :null
:nil                       -> "nil"          -> :nil
true                       -> true           -> true
false                      -> false          -> false
'hi'                       -> [104, 105]     -> 'hi'
"hi"                       -> "hi"           -> "hi"
:hi                        -> "hi"           -> "hi"
1                          -> 1              -> 1
1.25                       -> 1.25           -> 1.25
[]                         -> []             -> []
[true, 1.0]                -> [true, 1.0]    -> [true, 1.0]
{[]}                       -> {}             -> {[]}
{[{:foo, :bar}]}           -> {"foo": "bar"} -> {[{"foo", "bar"}]}
{[{"foo", "bar"}]}         -> {"foo": "bar"} -> {[{"foo", "bar"}]}