OpenResty::Tutorial::GettingStarted::Perl - Zero to OpenResty for Perl programmers

This tutorial should give you everything you need to start with an OpenResty account using Perl.

An OpenResty account

You should already have an account on an OpenResty server. You can either set up an OpenResty server on your own machine or just request an account on our Yahoo! China's production server by sending an email to agentzh@yahoo.cn. If you're running your own instance of the OpenResty server, you can use the following command to create an account (named foo) for yourself:

    $ bin/openresty adduser foo

You'll be prompted to enter a password for the Admin role of your foo account.

Throughout this tutorial, we'll assume you own an account named foo whose Admin role's password is hello1234. And the account belongs to the server api.openresty.org.

WWW::OpenResty::Simple

Because OpenResty's API is totally RESTful, that is, it's totally HTTP based. So it's completely okay to directly use a general HTTP client libary like LWP::UserAgent. But to make things even easier, we'll stick with a CPAN module, WWW::OpenResty::Simple, throughout the tutorial. In case you don't know, installing the WWW::OpenResty::Simple module is as simple as

    $ sudo cpan WWW::OpenResty::Simple

Commands will differ slightly if you're on Win32:

    C:\>cpan WWW::OpenResty::Simple

Note that if you use an account on others' OpenResty servers (like ours), you need not install the hairy OpenResty module on CPAN.

There's various different ways to login to your OpenResty account. But in a Perl script, we usually use the default Admin role with full priviledges:

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use utf8;
    use WWW::OpenResty::Simple;

    my $resty = WWW::OpenResty::Simple->new(
      { server => 'api.openresty.org' }
    );
    $resty->login('foo', 'hello1234');

The first statement loads the WWW::OpenResty::Simple module which we'll be using exclusively to manipulate our account. And in the second one, we created an instance of the WWW::OpenResty::Simple class with the domain of the OpenResty server we're using. It might be a different value on your side (i.e. localhost) if you're running your own instance of server.

It's not good practice to hard code your password explicitly in your scripts. I wrote the sample code this way merely for the demonstration purpose.

Usually we use OpenResty as a RESTy database. As with traditional relational database systems like mysql and PostgreSQL, we start by creating a "data schema". In OpenResty, Models often resembles database tables (but they could be something else as well). You can define a new Model like this:

    $resty->post(
        '/=/model/Post',
        {
            description => 'blog posts',
            columns => [
                { name => 'author', default => 'Anonymous' },
                { name => 'title', default => 'No title' },
                { name => 'content' },
                { name => 'created',
                  type => 'timestamp (0) with time zone',
                  default => ['now()'] },
                { name => 'comments', type => 'integer', default => 0 }
            ]
        }
    );

WWW::OpenResty::Simple objects' post method will issue an HTTP POST command behind the scene.

Agent Zhang (agentzh) agentzh@yahoo.cn

Copyright (c) 2007 by Yahoo! China EEEE Works, Alibaba Inc.