blackbird-server

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Blackbird is an HTTP server that runs on Node (ES6+). It has the following goals:

Simplicity: straightforward mapping of HTTP requests to JavaScript function calls
Asynchronous: responses can be deferred using Promises/A+ promises
Streaming: request and response bodies can be streamed
Composability: middleware composes easily using promises
Robustness: promises propagate errors up the call stack, simplifying error handling

Servers

Writing a "Hello world" HTTP server in BB is simple.

let BB = require('blackbird-server');
 
BB.serve(function (conn) {
  return "Hello world!";
});

All Blackbird applications receive a single argument: a Connection object. This object contains information about both the request and the response, as well as metadata including the method used in the request, the location of the request, the status of the response, and some helper methods.

Applications can send responses asynchronously using JavaScript promises. Simply return a promise from your app that resolves when the response is ready.

let app = BB.stack();
 
app.use(BB.logger);
 
app.get('/users/:id', function (conn) {
  let id = conn.params.id;
 
  return getUser(id).then(function (user) {
    conn.json(200, user);
  });
});

The call to app.use above illustrates how middleware is used to compose applications. BB ships with the following middleware:

BB.basicAuth: Provides authentication using HTTP Basic auth
BB.catch: Error handling at any position in the stack
BB.charset: Provides a default charset in responses
BB.contentType: Provides a default Content-Type
BB.favicon: Handles requests for /favicon.ico
BB.file: Efficiently serves static files
BB.gzip: Gzip-encodes response content for clients that Accept: gzip
BB.logger: Logs HTTP requests to the console
BB.mapper: Provides virtual host mapping, similar to Apache's Virtual Hosts or nginx server blocks
BB.methodOverride: Overrides the HTTP method used in the request, for clients (like HTML forms) that don't support methods other than GET and POST
BB.modified: HTTP caching using Last-Modified and ETag
BB.params: Multipart request parsing and handling
BB.proxy: Proxy request through to an alternate location
BB.rewrite: Rewrites request URLs on the fly, similar to Apache's mod_rewrite
BB.router: Request routing (ala Sinatra) based on the URL pathname
BB.session: HTTP sessions with pluggable storage including memory (for development and testing), cookies, and Redis
BB.stack: Provides a use mechanism for composing applications fronted by middleware
BB.token: Cross-site request forgery protection

Proxies

Because all BB applications share the same signature, it's easy to combine them in interesting ways. BB's HTTP proxy implementation illustrates this beautifully: a proxy is simply an application that forwards the request somewhere else.

let proxyApp = BB.createProxy('http://twitter.com');
 
// In a server environment we can use the BB.proxy middleware
// to proxy all requests to the proxy's location.
app.use(BB.proxy, proxyApp);
 
// In a client application we can call the proxy directly to
// send a request to the proxy's location.
BB.post(proxyApp, {
  params: {
    username: 'bkeown'
  }
});

Installation

Using npm:

$ npm install blackbird

Issues

Please file issues on the issue tracker on GitHub.

Tests

To run the tests in node:

$ npm install
$ npm test

The Redis session store tests rely on Redis to run successfully. By default they are skipped, but if you want to run them fire up a Redis server on the default host and port and set the $WITH_REDIS environment variable.

$ WITH_REDIS=1 npm test

To run the tests in Chrome:

$ npm install
$ npm run test-browser

Influences

License

MIT