Web Server Middleware for Dart

Introduction

Shelf makes it easy to create and compose web servers and parts of web servers. How?

• Expose a small set of simple types.
• Map server logic into a simple function: a single argument for the request, the response is the return value.
• Trivially mix and match synchronous and asynchronous processing.
• Flexibliity to return a simple string or a byte stream with the same model.

Example

See example/example_server.dart

import 'package:shelf/shelf.dart' as shelf;
import 'package:shelf/shelf_io.dart' as io;

void main() {
  var handler = const shelf.Stack().addMiddleware(shelf.logRequests())
      .addHandler(_echoRequest);

  io.serve(handler, 'localhost', 8080).then((server) {
    print('Serving at http://${server.address.host}:${server.port}');
  });
}

shelf.Response _echoRequest(shelf.Request request) {
  return new shelf.Response.ok('Request for "${request.url}"');
}

Inspiration

• Connect for NodeJS.
  • Read this great write-up to understand the overall philosophy of all of these models.
• Rack for Ruby.
• WSGI for Python.