Ruby CLI and API

Let us build a simple CLI with ruby and CocktailsDB API

Setup

gems/libraries that will be used:

1. Net::HTTP
2. open-uri
3. json

require 'net/http'
require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

Testing our API

For this demonstration, I will be using the API to search for a drink by name. Fortunately, our API provides an auth key without having to create an account.

https://www.thecocktaildb.com/api/json/v1/1/search.php?s=URL_PARAM

All we need to do is fetch the API with our search query.
https://www.thecocktaildb.com/api/json/v1/1/search.php?s=margarita
*notice I am replacing URL_PARAM with margarita at the end of our URL.

After visiting the link we get a json response that looks something like this.

{
    drinks: [
        {
            DRINK_ONE_INFO....
        },
        {
            DRINK_TWO_INFO....
        }
    ]
}

Fetching our API

We'll ask for user input and fetch query to our API endpoint in our fetch_drink_by_name method.

def fetch_drink_by_name
end

Getting user input

First, we'll prompt the user to enter a search query
puts "enter name of drink"

Then instruct the CLI to wait for input from the user, and store the input in a variable
query = gets.strip.

Finally, we will save our endpoint in a variable. Notice we are using template literal to add our user's query as a URL parameter.
url = "https://www.thecocktaildb.com/api/json/v1/1/search.php?s=#{query}"

Retrieving our data

Now we will retrieve our data in four simple steps

1. Convert URL to URI
2. Make a GET request and retrieve the body of the response.
3. Parse our JSON data and get info stored in our drinks object.
4. Print results(if any), otherwise print no results message.

I will print our drinks variable to CLI to make sure everything is working

require 'net/http'
require 'open-uri'
require 'json'

def fetch_drink_by_name
  puts "enter name of drink"
  query = gets.strip
  url = "https://www.thecocktaildb.com/api/json/v1/1/search.php?s=#{query}"
  uri = URI.parse(url)
  res = Net::HTTP.get_response(uri).body
  drinks = JSON.parse(res)["drinks"] 
  if drinks
    puts drinks
  else
    puts "sorry no results found"
  end
end

fetch_drink_by_name

All done, you may use the data however you wish. If everything works correctly your CLI will show an array of objects, with each object containing the drinks data. Or print "sorry no results found" if there were no results.