blockspring.rb

Ruby gem to assist in creating and running blocks (cloud functions) with Blockspring.

http://rubygems.org/gems/blockspring

Installation

To get started, we'll need ruby. If you don't have ruby on your machine, first visit https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/installation/ to install it.

Next:

$ gem install blockspring

Getting started

####Step 1: Write our block First, in an empty directory we'll save the following code to a file called block.rb.

# save this block.rb file into an empty directory.
require 'blockspring'

myBlock = lambda do |request, response|
  sum = request.params["num1"].to_f + request.params["num2"].to_f
  
  response.addOutput("sum", sum)

  response.end()
end

Blockspring.define(myBlock)

####Step 2: Test our block locally Next, we'll test our block locally:

// pass parameters via stdin (recommended)
$ echo '{"num1":20, "num2": 50}' | ruby block.rb

or

// pass parameters via command-line arguments
$ ruby block.rb --num1=20 --num2=50

Our response should be:

$ {"_blockspring_spec":true,"_errors":[],"sum":70.0}

Looks like our block can add!

####Step 3: Deploy our block Now it's time to deploy our block. We can deploy our block with the Blockspring online editor or with the Blockspring-CLI tool. Let's try out the command-line tool.

We'll need to login with Blockspring so if you don't have a blockspring account, visit https://api.blockspring.com/users/sign_up.

Run the following commands in the same directory as your block.rb file:

// Install the cli tool (make sure you have ruby installed)
$ gem install blockspring-cli

// Login to blockspring
$ blockspring login

// Deploy our block
$ blockspring push

Our block is deployed. That was easy.

Blockspring generated a blockspring.json file in our working directory along the way. Find the user (our username) and id (our block's id) parameters in this file, and let's run our block from the cloud:

$ echo '{"num1":20, "num2": 50}' | blockspring run <user>/<id>

We should get back the same result as when we ran the block locally:

$ {"_blockspring_spec":true,"_errors":[],"sum":70.0}

####Step 4: Customize our block The final step is to make our block a bit more usable. Let's open up blockspring.json and paste in the following.

Note: some values like the id, user, language, updated_at, and created_at shouldn't be changed.

{
  "id": DONT_CHANGE_THIS,
  "user": DONT_CHANGE_THIS,
  "title": "Summer",
  "description": "A basic block to sum two numbers",
  "parameters": [
    {
      "type": "number",
      "label": "Number 1",
      "parameter_name": "num1",
      "default": 50,
      "help_text": "Our first number to sum."
    },
    {
      "type": "number",
      "label": "Number 2",
      "parameter_name": "num2",
      "default": 20,
      "help_text": "Our second number to sum."
    }
  ],
  "is_public": true,
  "language": DONT_CHANGE_THIS,
  "updated_at": DONT_CHANGE_THIS,
  "created_at": DONT_CHANGE_THIS
}

Now let's push our block again to update it and then we'll open it up in Blockspring.

$ blockspring push
$ blockspring open

Voila! We set a title, description, and info about our block's parameters so that Blockspring could generate a simple UI. To find out more about parameters and UI input types, see here: https://api.blockspring.com/documentation.

API in Detail

######DEFINE Blockspring.define(function_name) accepts a single parameter: the name of the function we're defining in our block.

######RUN Blockspring.run(block_id, data, [api_key]) accepts three parameters:

• block_id: the block id that you'd like to run remotely.
• data: a hash of keys that serve as inputs to the block you're running remotely.
• api_key: our api_key found on Blockspring.com. This is an optional parameter. Without an api_key we'll rate limited to 10 calls per minute. If we're running Blockspring.run from an IDE, we should include an api_key. If we're including a Blockspring.run within our defined block, we don't need to include the api_key.

######Request

• request.params: a hash of inputs being sent into our block.
• request.getErrors(): parse all the errors being input into our block.

######Response

• response.addOutput(key, value): add a key and value to the output of our block.
• response.addFileOutput(key, path_to_file): add a file to the output of our block.
• response.addErrorOutput(title, [message]): add an error message. Message is an optional parameter.
• response.end(): call this at the end of our block to print out the results correctly.

Here's a sample block that touches on each function in the API:

# save this block.rb file into an empty directory.
require 'blockspring'

myBlock = lambda do |request, response|
    if request.getErrors().length > 0
        response.addErrorOutput("Errors in request", "Our block ran even though errors were passed in through request.")
    end
    
    File.open("truth.txt", 'w') { |file| file.write("I <3 blockspring!") }
    response.addFileOutput("my_file", "truth.txt")
    
    sentiment = Blockspring.run("pkpp1233/6dd22564137f10b8108ec6c8f354f031", {"text" => "hey there, this is so much fun!"})
    response.addOutput("sentiment", sentiment["polarity"])
    response.end()
end

Blockspring.define(myBlock)

Try a blockspring push and blockspring open and check out the response using the UI.

License

MIT

Contact

Email us: founders@blockspring.com