Leading or trailing `and`?

[vi]

Shall Weave support leading or trailing and in command line?:

OPTS=
OPTS="$OPTS =8080/q to http://127.0.0.1:1234/ and"
OPTS="$OPTS =8080/w to http://127.0.0.1:1235/ and"
OPTS="$OPTS =8080/e to http://127.0.0.1:1236/ and"
weave $OPTS

Or can and be made completely optional?

[jsdw]

I'm not super keen on allowing a trailing and because in many cases that is more likely to signal a usage error than anything else.

Can you give an example of a way you'd like to use weave that would benefit from a trailing and? In the above example it would be easy to avoid it; do you plan on doing some more complex programmatic usage?

[vi]

In the above example it would be easy to avoid it

How would it be avoided without making any line (first or last) special and without additional code?

---

Another idea is a dummy forward, so that the code can be like this:

OPTS=dummy
OPTS="and $OPTS =8080/q to http://127.0.0.1:1234/"
OPTS="and $OPTS =8080/w to http://127.0.0.1:1235/"
OPTS="and $OPTS =8080/e to http://127.0.0.1:1236/"
weave $OPTS

This would also allow easy popularion of routes from scripts.

One more idea: OPTS="=8080 to dummy" to allow starting Weave with effectively zero routes - it should still listen to the port, but simply return 404 for all requests.

[jsdw]

How would it be avoided without making any line (first or last) special and without additional code?

I'm not super keen on allowing a trailing or leading 'and' as I think it would often be a sign of user error in typical weave usage.

The idea of a dummy/noop/sink route is interesting though and, as you say, would provide a workaround.

Do you have any concrete reasons for binding to a port and returning a status code? I would be tempted to allow you to forward to something like status://404 so that you can return whatever status code you like. This aligns with how I would handle other types of resources like WebSockets (I should probably allow file:// as well)

[vi]

Yes, returning arbitrary status codes also fits the bill.

The main idea is forming list of routes programmatically, from multiple optional sources. Example:

ROUTES="8080 to status://404"
if [ "$FOO" = "yes" ]; then
    ROUTES="$ROUTES and =8080/foo to http://foo/"
fi
if [ "$BAR" = "yes" ]; then
    ROUTES="$ROUTES and =8080/bar to http://bar/"
fi
weave $ROUTES

Startup error should be avoided even in no/no case.

[jsdw]

I've implemented a version of this (support for "nothing" in place of a route, and support for "statuscode://204" style syntax as the destination route (or "nothing" there as an alias for "statuscode://404"). in the latest release (v0.5.1), so I'll close this. Let me know what you think! :)

[vi]

only valid HTTP status codes are allowed

Why so? I'd expect it to support any 2xx, 4xx and 5xx status codes, including custom non-standard. Weave looks like a proper tool for prototyping that.

By the way, does it support 3xx status codes with a Location: header? It can be done low-levelish with an pseudo-URL like statuscode://302?location=http%3a%2d%2fexample.com%2f, maybe with a user-friendly alias like redirect:http://example.com/

[jsdw]

Valid as in, a status code that exists rather than one that signals "ok" (2xx) :)

Weave doesn't support headers; redirects are currently passed back to the browser but I have pondered allowing weave to handle them!

[vi]

Redirects are currently passed back to the browser but I have pondered allowing weave to handle them!

I mean emitting new redirects to location specified on command line.

Maybe a separate Github issues shall be for redirect handling.

[jsdw]

Yep, feel free to create a new issue :)