webdis: HTTP + JSON API for Redis

HTTP is the dial tone of the web. Apps that speak HTTP tend to grow in popularity, such as CouchDB whose built-in HTTP-based RESTful API makes it super easy to store and retrieve JSON data.

Nicolas Favre-Felix gives some web love to Redis fans with Webdis, an HTTP interface for Redis that serves up JSON. Built in C, Webdis aims to be fast like Redis itself. The URL structure takes the pattern of:

http://127.0.0.1:7379/COMMAND/KEY/[VALUE]

Let’s look at some concrete examples:

curl http://127.0.0.1:7379/SET/hello/world
→ {"SET":[true,"OK"]}

curl http://127.0.0.1:7379/GET/hello
→ {"GET":"world"}

curl -d "GET/hello" http://127.0.0.1:7379/
→ {"GET":"world"}

While still early in development, the feature set is impressive. Webdis currently offers:

Support for GET and POST
JSON and JSONP parameter (?jsonp=myFunction).
Raw Redis 2.0 protocol output with .raw suffix
HTTP 1.1 pipelining
TCP or UNIX socket Redis connections
CIDR or HTTP Basic Auth security
Pub/Sub using Transfer-Encoding: chunked. Coupled with JSONP, Webdis can be used as a Comet server
Built-in support for json, txt, ‘html, xml, xhtml, png, and jpg
Custom Content-Type types based on file extension, or ?type=some/thing
Cross-origin XHR, if compiled with libevent2 (for OPTIONS support)
File upload with PUT, if compiled with libevent2 (for PUT support)

Check the README for the complete list. If you’d like to contribute, Nicolas is thinking about how to add other HTTP verb support like PUT and DELETE, Websockets, and Etags.

Also, if you missed it, be sure and catch episode #45 with @antirez, the creator of Redis.

[Source on GitHub] [Comment on Hacker News]