defndaines / argo

Clojure server that's really just a vehicle for JSON testing.

Argo

A small HTTP Kit server for playing around with JSON logging.

This project is now dormant. It was a learning and exploration project for me.

I started looking at how to log JSON when I came across a set of security vulnerabilities in another logging library. Putting that up against performance benchmarks I'd seen which indicated that Log4J2 was the current state of the art and that there is a JSON Layout option native to Log4J2, I thought it would be simple to just get that working.

I was wrong. I was surprised to find hardly any documentation and answered questions online on this topic which were not simply tied to using the old approach of a patterned layout. What I expected was some functionality which would automatically turn logged messages into JSON if they were passed as a JSON-able structure. I thought the objectMessageAsJsonObject would accomplish this. The PR that added this flag, however, showed me that this was not the immediate goal of that feature. The single test adding this feature only proves that an integer passed as the message to the logging statement will be treated as a numeric value instead of a string. What I was expecting was something like passing a HashMap and having it converted to a richer JSON structure.

I think there is a path forward here, which it to implement and explicitly add a Codec which handles data structures passed to the logging function. This seems like a solvable problem, but outside the scope of what I was looking to explore at this time.

Usage

Run Server from a REPL

Use clj to start a REPL, then,

user=> (require '[argo.server :as argo])
nil

user=> (argo/-main)
#object[clojure.lang.AFunction$1 0x2b8bb184 "clojure.lang.AFunction$1@2b8bb184"]

Run Server from Command Line

To run the server straight from the command line:

clj -m argo.server

Send Messages to the Server

To send a JSON body into the server:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST \
  -d "{\"transaction-id\":\"$(uuidgen)\"}" \
  'http://localhost:8080/'