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Merquery

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merquery_github_demo.mp4

Powered by the wonderful Req library, Merquery is an interactive and extensible HTTP client for Elixir and Livebook. Conveniently packaged as a Livebook SmartCell, you can just add Merquery as a dependency to any Livebook notebook then have access to it under the Smart menu when adding a new cell.

Although Merquery is made with Elixir developers in mind, anyone can use it as an interactive HTTP client, but to take advantage of features such as code generation, mix merquery.generate, and writing custom plugins, you will need to write Elixir.

Merquery currently consists of 2 components:

  • Merquery Smart Cell that provides an interactive way to work with HTTP requests, akin to Postman
  • A mix task -- mix merquery.generate -- which introspects on your router and generates Merquery smart cells pre-filled with the information relevant to each route.

Merquery takes advantage of the Livebook ecosystem to have built-in support for serialization and secret storage, so you can save queries for later usage and use keys from your Livebook Hub token vault.

It also can be used to generate source code just as all Smart Cells do. You can use Merquery as a learning tool to learn how to use Elixir HTTP clients.

Features

  • Supports REST operations

  • Easily toggle Req Steps to customize the request behavior

  • Import/export to/from cURL (thanks to CurlReq)

  • Supports plaintext, secret / environment variables, and custom binding variables in headers, parameters, and body fields.

  • Supports various body content types:

    • application/x-www-urlencoded with toggleable fields and support for secrets and custom variables (transforms to an Elixir map and uses the :form Req option)
    • Raw field to support many content types with syntax highlighting and taking advantage of Req's encode_body step:
      • application/json allows you to write JSON and have it converted to an Elixir map and use the :json Req option.
      • application/javascript
      • application/xml
      • text/html
      • text/plain

  • Auth section to conveniently handle authentication header

  • Includes an escape hatch to passthrough custom options to the Req request using the Options tab. Accepts an Elixir Keyword to merge with the top-level options.

  • Convert to code cell (generates Elixir code for the given request)

  • Persists state as Livebook attr so you can pick up where you last left off

  • With mix merquery.generate, you can generate Merquery smart cells from your Phoenix routes, and can even pass default parameters for each route using the :metadata option from the Phoenix router helpers

    get "/files/:id", FileController, :show, metadata: %{merquery: [path_params: [id: 1], headers: [accept: "application/json"]]}

Plugins

Merquery takes advantage of the Req Plugin API to extend the functionality of the HTTP client. You can read more about Req Plugins here.

There is a list of curated plugins in Merquery (you can see the list here), but you can make your own plugins or add other plugins that are not explicitly defined in Merquery.Plugins so long as the module exports an attach/1 function and is loaded. None of the plugins in Merquery.Plugins ship with Merquery, but Merquery supports easily adding them through the Plugins tab (feel free to suggest more plugins too!).

Once a plugin is available in Merquery, you can toggle it on and off, just as you can most key-value parameters in Merquery.

Options

Req accepts many different options in its top-level API (or when creating a new Req.Request struct) that change the behavior of the request. Plugins also might define their own options that they accept. Since it would be impossible to handle the variety of acceptable option values through key/value pairs, the Option tab offers a way to passthrough custom Elxir options in the form of a keyword list. It also supports using previously bound variables.

Installation

def deps do
  [
    {:merquery, github: "acalejos/merquery"}
  ]
end

Development

From within the assets directory run npm i and npm run dev

This should download all dependencies and run a watchful Vite build. This will put the newly built assets into the appropriate folder and watch for changes.

Roadmap

Currently, this is just a fun project I am working on and this roadmap is subject to change. You may submit feature requests in the form of a GitHub issue.

These are just some ideas for features I currently have, but are subject to change:

  • Finish basic REST operations support
  • Registering custom plugins
  • Improve mix merquery.generate
    • Allow customized parameters for routes, etc.
    • Add Table of Contents at Top
  • Migrate to TailwindCSS
  • Use a distinctive design palette
  • Req plugin discoverability - Host a location where Req plugins can be submitted for others to discover for use with Merquery (Currently done within this project)
  • Livebook routes instant deploy - Have a mix task (e.g. mix merquery.deploy) to automatically deploy the generated livebook from mix merquery.generate
  • Support other HTTP clients and their unique features (HTTPoison, Tesla, etc. ) (EDIT: Forgoing the idea of pluggable clients and instead focusing entirely on Req)
  • Move Vue to Composition API and breakout components to SPCs (EDIT: Keeping options API for now, but moved to using SFCs)
  • Import from OpenAPI Spec
  • Import/export to/from cURL
  • Import/export to/from file (select from prompts)
  • Auth section
  • Tabs for multiple queries
  • Query history (could use scan_eval_result callback)