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Flashheart

A fully-featured REST client built for ease-of-use and resilience

Features

Circuit breaker

By default the client implements a circuit breaker using the Levee library. It is configured to trip after 100 failures and resets after 10 seconds. This can be configured using the circuitBreakerMaxFailures and circuitBreakerResetTimeout properties.

For example to trip after 200 failures and try to reset after 30 seconds:

 const restClient = require('flashheart');
 const StatsD = require('node-statsd');

 const client = restClient.createClient({
    name: 'my-client',
    circuitbreaker: {
      maxFailures: 200,
      resetTimeout: 30000
    }
  });

Caching

If caching is enabled, the client will cache response with a max-age directive. You can specify the caching storage with an instance of Catbox using the cache parameter.

const Catbox = require('catbox').Client;
const Memory = require('catbox-memory');
const storage = new Catbox(new Memory());
const flashheart = require('flashheart')

const client = flashheart.createClient({
   name: 'my-client',
   externalCache: {
     cache: storage
   },
  // varyOn: [ 'accept-language' ] - optional, refer to https://github.com/bbc/http-transport-cache#cache-key-structure
});

The staleIfError directive is also supported. If a response has a staleIfError directive, the response will be cached for the duration of the stale-if-error directive as well as the max-age and will try to retrieve them in this order:

  • max-age stored version fresh version
  • stale-if-error stale version

Retries

By default the client retries failed requests once, with a delay of 100 milliseconds between attempts. The number of times to retry and the delay between retries can be configured using the retries and retryDelay properties.

For example, to retry 10 times, with a delay of 500ms:

 const restClient = require('flashheart');
 const StatsD = require('node-statsd');

 const client = restClient.createClient({
    name: 'my-client',
    retries: 10,
    retryDelay: 500
  });

Only request errors or server errors result in a retry; 4XX errors are not retried.

Rate Limiting

The client has no rate limitation by default. You can specify how many requests are allowed to happen within a given interval - respectively with the rateLimit and rateLimitInterval properties.

const restClient = require('flashheart');
const client = restClient.createClient({	
 rateLimit: 10,         // Allow a maxmimum of 10 requests…	
 rateLimitInterval: 6000,    // In an interval of 6 seconds (6000ms)	
});

Note: rate limiting is provided by simple-rate-limiter.

Timeout

The client has a default timeout of 2 seconds. You can override this when creating a client by setting the timeout property.

const flashheart = require('flashheart');

const client = flashheart.createClient({
  timeout: 50
});

Logging

All requests can be logged at info level if you provide a logger that supports the standard logging API (like console or Winston)

const flashheart = require('flashheart');

const client = flashheart.createClient({
  logger: console
});

JSON

The client assumes you're working with a JSON API by default. It uses the json: true option in request (default client) to send the Accept: application/json header and automatically parse the response into an object. If you need to call an API that returns plain text, XML, animated GIFs etc. then set the json flag to false in your request options.

Errors

Any response with a status code greater than or equal to 400 results in an error. There's no need to manually check the status code of the response. The status code is exposed as err.statusCode and the headers are assigned to err.headers.

Stats

Metrics can be sent to StatsD by providing an instance of the node-statsd client:

const StatsD = require('node-statsd');
const stats = new StatsD();
const flashheart = require('flashheart');

const client = flashheart.createClient({
  stats: stats
});

The following metrics are sent from each client:

Name Type Description
{name}.requests Counter Incremented every time a request is made
{name}.responses.{code} Counter Incremented every time a response is received
{name}.request_errors Counter Incremented every time a request fails (timeout, DNS lookup fails etc.)
{name}.response_time Timer Measures of the response time in milliseconds across all requests
{name}.retries Counter Incremented every time the request retries
{name}.attempts Timer Measures the number of attempts
{name}.cache.hits Counter Incremented for each cache hit
{name}.cache.misses Counter Incremented for each cache miss
{name}.cache.errors Counter Incremented whenever there's is a problem communicating with the cache

The {name} variable comes from the name option you pass to createClient. It defaults to http if you don't name your client.

Custom HTTP Client

By default, Flashheart uses request under the hood and configures it with a set of default values. You can however, configure and pass in your own instance of request (for example, if you need to use certificates). This can be done by setting httpClient property when creating Flashheart client. Please also note that in order for this to work, you need to use another layer of abstraction and pull in @bbc/http-transport.

 const restClient = require('flashheart');
 const request = require('request');
 const httpTransport = require('@bbc/http-transport');

 const requestClient = request.defaults({
   json: true,
   timeout: 1000,
   time: true,
   gzip: true,
   forever: true,
   agentOptions: {
     maxSockets: 1000
   },
   strictSSL: true,
   cert: fs.readFileSync('./client.crt'),
   key: fs.readFileSync('./client.key'),
   ca: fs.readFileSync('./client.crt')
 });

 const RequestTransport = httpTransport.RequestTransport;
 const httpClient = new RequestTransport(requestClient);

 const client = restClient.createClient({
    name: 'my-client',
    httpClient
  });