An aid for those developing against the Summon api

I whipped this thing up. JSON syntax highlighting might be nice, working on it.

https://github.com/jrochkind/summon_debug_proxy

When developing against the Serials Solutions Summon search API, as with many HTTP apis, it can be convenient to interact directly with the API Server, in an iterative interaction fashion. Say, in your browser.

However, the Summon API’s auth requirements (involving crypto-calculated headers) make this inconvenient in a browser.

The Summon docs have an embedded sort of ‘console’ app that at first looks convenient for this — but turns out it’s got a number of bugs, at least at the time I write this (June 20 2013). For instance, it refuses to recognize more than one query param with the same key, even though Summon API uses this convention.

So here’s a dirt simple bare-bones ruby Sinatra app that will be a sort of ‘proxy’ for testing the Summon API, taking care of the auth headers for you. You can run it on linux or osx if you have ruby 1.9.3+ installed, dunno about Windows. It probably has bugs at the edges, and could use some more features. Patches welcome.

git clone then…

# Need your Summon api keys in environment variables
$ export SUMMON_ACCESS_ID=your_access_id
$ export SUMMON_SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key

$ cd summon_demo_proxy
$ bundle install
$ rackup -p 3000 # port starts on port 3000

Now visit http://your.server.tld:3000/search?s.q=foo. Add whatever Summon API strings you want after the ? mark. You’ll get back raw JSON.

Or change to /search.html? to get pretty-printed JSON embedded in an HTML pre tag.

NOTE WELL Do not put this on the public web unless you’ve protected it behind a firewall and/or password protection, or you’ve exposed a backdoor into your Summon API access to anyone on the internet, skipping auth!

Note also You can also easily deploy this app in a more permanent way using Phusion Passneger, same as any rack app. Don’t forget to set the Summon api key env variables so Passenger picks up em, google the passenger docs.