I’m excited to share Merquery, a new library I’m working on to bring interactive HTTP tooling to Elixir.
This project started off as a way to practice making Livebook Smart Cells, where I wanted to implement a Postman-Styled Smart Cell. As I made progress I realized that there’s a lot of potential in this tool for tighter integration with Elixir.
Merquery currently consists of 2 components:
Merquery Smart Cell that provides an interactive way to work with HTTP requests, akin to Postman
A mix task – mix merquery.generate – which introspects on your router and generates Merquery smart cells pre-filled with the information relevant to each route.
Merquery takes advantage of the Livebook ecosystem to have built in support for serialization and secret storage, so you can save queries for later usage and use keys from your Livebook Hub token vault.
It also can be used to generate source code just as all Smart Cells do. You can use Merquery as a learning tool to learn how to use Elixir HTTP clients.
The library is currently in its infancy, but below are some ideas I have going forward.
These are just some ideas for features I currently have, but are subject to change:
Finish basic REST operations support
Registering custom plugins
Improve mix merquery.generate
Allow customized parameters for routes, etc.
Add Table of Contents at Top
Migrate to TailwindCSS and distinctive design palette
Req plugin discoverability - Host a location where Req plugins can be submitted for others to
discover for use with Merquery
Livebook routes instant deploy - Have a mix task (e.g. mix merquery.deploy) to automatically
deploy the generated livebook from mix merquery.generate
Support other HTTP clients and their unique features (HTTPoison, Tesla, etc. )
Move Vue to Composition API and breakout components to SPCs
Move Vue to Composition API and breakout components to SPCs
FTR we’ve recently started using an actual bundler setup in Kino and moved towards React for smart cells, with Tailwind. There is a @livebook/kino-bundler package that encapsulates the basic setup (including Livebook Tailwind config). You can see kino Remote execution cell or kino_bumblebee Task cell for examples. Still, the idea is that you can use whatever setup and framework you prefer, I am mentioning this just for completeness : )
Having a mix task to side-load Livebook in any mix project would be useful. Maybe that could be solved generically, and not specifically for Merquery. I have projects that have some livemd files useful during development. Although Livebook desktop is super easy to set up, it would be even smoother to have a mix taks you could fire up, with a specific livebook loaded by default. Just thinking out loud here…
FTR we’ve recently started using an actual bundler setup in Kino and moved towards React for smart cells, with Tailwind. There is a @livebook/kino-bundler package that encapsulates the basic setup (including Livebook Tailwind config). You can see kino Remote execution cell or kino_bumblebee Task cell for examples. Still, the idea is that you can use whatever setup and framework you prefer, I am mentioning this just for completeness : )
Thanks for the suggestion and all of the great work on Livebook! I already wanted to move to Tailwind and clean up the JS side, so I think that would be a good move. Looking at the repos you mentioned, it seems much cleaner.
Having a mix task to side-load Livebook in any mix project would be useful. Maybe that could be solved generically, and not specifically for Merquery. I have projects that have some livemd files useful during development. Although Livebook desktop is super easy to set up, it would be even smoother to have a mix taks you could fire up, with a specific livebook loaded by default. Just thinking out loud here…
Yeah that sounds like a more generic use case. Perhaps it would involve starting up a Remote Execution Cell
Awesome! A programmable postman. Very cool.
Glad you like it! Yeah, I think Req plugins offer an easy entry point for customizing it, and plan on leaning into them with this project.
