willcode2surf / mach

A better way to build web servers in node.js

Mach

Mach is a better way to build fully asynchronous web servers using node.js. It has the following goals:

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

"Hello world" in Mach is simple.

require("mach").serve(function (request) {
  return "Hello world!";
});

More complex applications can be built through the use of various middleware. Mach includes middleware for doing many common tasks including Sinatra-style request routing, HTTP caching, content negotiation, multipart handling, and much more. Asynchronous responses are fully supported through the use of promises.

A more full-featured example might look like this:

var mach = require('mach');
var app = mach.stack();

// Log all requests.
app.use(mach.logger);

// Serve requests to the "files" subdomain with a static file server.
app.map('files.example.com', function (app) {
  app.use(mach.file, '/www/downloads');
});

app.use(mach.session);    // HTTP sessions
app.use(mach.params);     // Parse request parameters

app.get('/', function (request) {
  return "Hello world!";
});

// GET /posts/123.json
app.get('/posts/:post_id.json', function (request, postId) {
  return query('SELECT * FROM posts WHERE id=?', postId).then(JSON.stringify);
});

// POST /posts/123/comments
app.post('/posts/:post_id/comments', function (request) {
  var authorId = request.params.author_id;
  var commentBody = request.params.body;
  // ...
  return 201;
});

// Serve the app, listening on port 3000.
mach.serve(app, 3000);

Please checkout the docs for more information and lots of usage examples.

Issues

Please file issues on the issue tracker on GitHub.

Specs

Before you run the specs, do an npm install.

To run all the specs:

$ mocha spec

To run an individual spec:

$ mocha spec/content-type-spec.js

The Redis session store specs 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 mocha spec

Influences

• Strata
• Q-HTTP
• JSGI & Jack
• node.js