Glenlivet

Create flexible, reusable processing pipelines powered by plugins.

Installation

npm install glenlivet

Usage

Bottles

Bottles encapsulate a hierarchical system of named hooks. When a bottle is "served", it traverses the hooks and runs any middleware attached to each.

Plugins

Plugins modify bottles by extending the hook hierarchy, attaching middleware, or adding methods. You add them to bottles with the .plugins() method:

var htmlToJsonPlugin = require('glenlivet-htmltojson');
var requestPlugin = require('glenlivet-request');
 
var getStructure = glenlivet.createBottle({
  request: {
    uri: function (data) {
      return data.uri;
    }
  },
  htmlToJson: ['> *', {
    'id': function ($el) {
      return $el.attr('id') || null;
    },
    'tagName': function ($el) {
      return $el[0].tagName;
    },
    'className': function ($el) {
      return $el.attr('class') || null;
    },
    'children': function () {
      return this.recurse();
    }
  }]
}).plugins([
  htmlToJsonPlugin,
  requestPlugin
]);

Plugins are loaded if their namespace exists as a key within the bottle configuration.

Barrels

Barrels group together bottles, and provide functionality like configuration defaults, plugin autoloading, and global middleware for member bottles.

var glenlivet = require('glenlivet');
 
var prolific = glenlivet.createBarrel({
  plugins: [
    require('glenlivet-request'),
    require('glenlivet-htmltojson')
  ],
  pluginDefaults: {
    request: {
      host: 'www.prolificinteractive.com'
    }
  }
});
 
var getLinks = prolific.bottle('getLinks', {
  request: {
    pathname: function (data) {
      return data.page || '/';
    }
  },
  htmlToJson: ['a[href]', {
    'href': function ($a) {
      return $a.attr('href');
    },
    'text': function ($a) {
      return $a.text();
    }
  }]
}).method('json');

Any plugins will be loaded with each bottle, as long as they have the config key corresponding to the plugin's namespace. Any pluginDefaults will be mixed into the bottle configuration for the corresponding plugins.

Writing Plugins

Middleware

Bottles come with a set of default middleware hooks:

• preempt: Things that might make the rest of the middleware unnecessary, for example caching.
• setup: Getting options prepared for process middleware. The main purpose is to allow other plugins to modify those options.
• process: For data-generating procedures, for example making an HTTP request.
• filter: Transforms data created by process middleware.
• persist: Meant for things like caching to save the results at the end of the pipeline.

glenlivet.createPlugin()

Plugins are created using the glenlivet.createPlugin() method. This method takes two arguments, the first being the configuration namespace it will use, and a callback that is called every time the plugin is used by a bottle. The first argument of that function is the configuration for that plugin, while this corresponds to the bottle.

You'll mostly be using the bottle's middleware() method to read and write new values on the data object, like so:

var htmlToJson = require('htmlToJson');
var glenlivet = reuqire('glenlivet');
 
module.exports = glenlivet.createPlugin('htmlToJson', function (filter) {
  this.middleware('filter:htmlToJson', function (data, next, done) {
    htmlToJson
      .parse(data.html, filter)
      .done(function (json) {
        data.json = json;
        next();
      }, done);
  });
});

Notice the name of the middleware filter:htmlToJson. It will automatically create that hook within the existing filter. However, the hook will not be added if the immediate parent does not exist. For example, filter:a:b:c will not work until all ancestors are added to the hook hierarchy. This way we can create sub-plugins that depend on the existence of another plugin to work.

Examples

A scraped API with htmlToJson, request, and Express