Ruby client for the Contentful Content Delivery API.
Contentful provides a content infrastructure for digital teams to power content in websites, apps, and devices. Unlike a CMS, Contentful was built to integrate with the modern software stack. It offers a central hub for structured content, powerful management and delivery APIs, and a customizable web app that enable developers and content creators to ship digital products faster.
Add to your Gemfile and bundle:
gem 'contentful'
client = Contentful::Client.new(
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
space: 'cfexampleapi'
)
If you plan on using the Preview API you need to specify the api_url
:
client = Contentful::Client.new(
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
space: 'cfexampleapi',
api_url: 'preview.contentful.com'
)
You can query for entries, assets, etc. very similar as described in the Delivery API Documentation. Please note, that all methods of the Ruby client library are snake_cased, instead of JavaScript's camelCase:
client.content_types
client.entry 'nyancat'
You can pass the usual filter options to the query:
client.entries(content_type: 'cat') # query for a content-type by its ID (not name)
client.entries('sys.id[ne]' => 'nyancat') # query for all entries except 'nyancat'
client.entries(include: 1) # include one level of linked resources
client.entries(content_type: 'cat', include: 1) # you can also combine multiple parameters
The results are returned as Contentful::Resource objects. Multiple results will be returned as Contentful::Array. The properties of a resource can be accessed through Ruby methods.
content_type = client.content_type 'cat'
content_type.description # "Meow."
System Properties behave the same and can be accessed via the #sys
method.
content_type.id # => 'cat'
entry.type # => 'Entry'
asset.sys # { id: '...', type: '...' }
Entry Fields usually don't have direct method accessors, since they are based on individual content types. These fields can be accessed through the #fields
method:
entry = client.entry 'nyancat'
entry.fields[:color] # rainbow
Please note, that no field type conversions will be done for entries by default.
However, you can (and should) set :dynamic_entries
to :auto
in your client configuration. When using this option, the client will fetch all available content types and use them to create dynamic entries on the fly.
client = Contentful::Client.new(
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
space: 'cfexampleapi',
dynamic_entries: :auto
)
entry = client.entry 'nyancat' # => #<Contentful::DynamicEntry[cat]: ...>
entry.color # => 'rainbow'
Dynamic entries will have getter classes for the fields and do type conversions properly.
The :auto
mode will fetch all content types on initialization. If you want to do it by hand later, you will need to set the option to :manual
and call client.update_dynamic_entry_cache!
to initialize all dynamic entries.
Entries can have multiple locales, by default, the client only fetches the entry with only its default locale. If you want to fetch a different locale you can do the following:
entries = client.entries(locale: 'de-DE')
Then all the fields will be fetched for the requested locale.
Contentful Delivery API also allows to fetch all locales, you can do so by doing:
entries = client.entries(content_type: 'cat', locale: '*')
# assuming the entry has a field called name
my_spanish_name = entries.first.fields('es-AR')[:name]
When requesting multiple locales, the object accessor shortcuts only work for the default locale.
Contentful::Array has an #each
method that delegates to its items. It also includes Ruby's Enumerable module, providing methods like #min
or #first
. See the Ruby core documentation for further details.
Arrays also have a #next_page
URL, which will rerun the request with a increased skip parameter, as described in the documentation.
You can easily request a resource that is represented by a link by calling #resolve
:
happycat = client.entry 'happycat'
happycat.fields[:image]
# => #<Contentful::Link: @sys={:type=>"Link", :linkType=>"Asset", :id=>"happycat"}>
happycat.fields[:image].resolve # => #<Contentful::Asset: @fields={ ...
There is a helpful method to add image resize options for an asset image:
client.asset('happycat').image_url
# => "//images.contentful.com/cfexampleapi/3MZPnjZTIskAIIkuuosCss/
# 382a48dfa2cb16c47aa2c72f7b23bf09/happycatw.jpg"
client.asset('happycat').image_url width: 300, height: 200, format: 'jpg', quality: 100
# => "//images.contentful.com/cfexampleapi/3MZPnjZTIskAIIkuuosCss/
# 382a48dfa2cb16c47aa2c72f7b23bf09/happycatw.jpg?w=300&h=200&fm=jpg&q=100"
Resources, that have been requested directly (i.e. no child resources), can be fetched from the server again by calling #reload
:
entries = client.entries
entries.reload # Fetches the array of entries again
While for known field types, the field data is accessible using methods or the #fields
hash with symbol keys, it behaves differently for nested data of the type "Object". The client will treat them as arbitrary hashes and will not parse the data inside, which also means, this data is indexed by Ruby strings, not symbols.
Required option. The name of the space you want to access.
Required option. The space's secret token.
Whether to use https. Defaults to true
.
How to authenticate with the API. Supports :header
(default) or :query_string
.
If set to true
(default), error responses will be raised. If set to false
, the error objects will simply be returned.
:auto
or :manual
. See resource description above for details on usage.
Defaults to false
. If enabled, the API responses will not be parsed to resource objects. Might be useful for debugging.
See next paragraph for explanation
Enables gzip response content encoding, default to: true
Logging is disabled by default, it can be enabled by setting a logger instance and a logging severity.
client = Contentful::Client.new(
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
space: 'cfexampleapi',
logger: logger_instance,
log_level: Logger::DEBUG
)
Example loggers:
Rails.logger
Logger.new('logfile.log')
The default severity is set to INFO and logs only the request attributes (headers, parameters and url). Setting it to DEBUG will also log the raw JSON response.
To be able to perform a request behind a proxy, you need to specify a :proxy_host
. This can be a domain or IP address of the proxy server.
Specify the port number that is used by the proxy server for client connections.
To use the proxy with authentication, you need to specify port_username
and port_password
.
To increase or decrease the retry attempts after a 429 Rate Limit error. Default value is 1. Using 0 will disable retry behaviour.
Each retry will be attempted after the value (in seconds) of the X-Contentful-RateLimit-Reset
header, which contains the amount of seconds until the next
non rate limited request is available, has passed. This is blocking per execution thread.
Maximum time to wait for next available request (in seconds). Default value is 60 seconds. Keep in mind that if you hit the hourly rate limit maximum, you can have up to 60 minutes of blocked requests. It is set to a default of 60 seconds in order to avoid blocking processes for too long, as rate limit retry behaviour is blocking per execution thread.
When true, reuse hydrated Entry and Asset objects within the same request when possible. Can result in a large speed increase and better handles cyclical object graphs.
This can be a good alternative to max_include_resolution_depth
if your content model contains (or can contain) circular references.
Maximum amount of levels to resolve includes for SDK entities (this is independent of API-level includes - it represents the maximum depth the include resolution
tree is allowed to resolved before falling back to Link
objects). This include resolution strategy is in place in order to avoid having infinite circular recursion
on resources with circular dependencies. Defaults to 20. Note: If you're using something like Rails::cache
it's advisable to considerably lower this value
(around 5 has proven to be a good compromise - but keep it higher or equal than your maximum API-level include parameter if you need the entire tree resolution).
Note that when reuse_entries
is enabled, the max include resolution depth only affects deep chains of unique objects (ie, not simple circular references).
When doing the v2 upgrade, all keys and accessors were changed to always use snake_case
. This option introduces the ability to use camelCase
for keys and method
accessors. This is very useful for isomorphic applications.
client = Contentful::Client.new(
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
space: 'cfexampleapi',
proxy_host: '127.0.0.1',
proxy_port: 8080,
proxy_username: 'username',
proxy_password: 'secret_password',
)
You can define your own classes that will be returned instead of the predefined ones. Consider, you want to build a better Asset class. One way to do this is:
class MyBetterAsset < Contentful::Asset
def https_image_url
image_url.sub %r<\A//>, 'https://'
end
end
You can register your custom class on client initialization:
client = Contentful::Client.new(
space: 'cfexampleapi',
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
resource_mapping: {
'Asset' => MyBetterAsset
}
)
More information on :resource_mapping
can be found in examples/resource_mapping.rb and more on custom classes in examples/custom_classes.rb
You can also register custom entry classes to be used based on the entry's content_type using the :entry_mapping configuration:
class Cat < Contentful::Entry
# define methods based on :fields, etc
end
client = Contentful::Client.new(
space: 'cfexampleapi',
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
entry_mapping: {
'cat' => Cat
}
)
client.entry('nyancat') # is instance of Cat
The client also includes a wrapper for the synchronization endpoint. You can initialize it with the options described in the Delivery API Documentation or an URL you received from a previous sync:
client = Contentful::Client.new(
access_token: 'b4c0n73n7fu1',
space: 'cfexampleapi',
default_locale: 'en-US'
)
sync = client.sync(initial: true, type: 'Deletion') # Only returns deleted entries and assets
sync = client.sync("https://cdn.contentful.com/spaces/cfexampleapi/sync?sync_token=w5ZGw6JFwqZmVcKsE8Kow4gr...sGPg") # Continues a sync
You can access the results either wrapped in Contentful::SyncPage
objects:
sync.each_page do |page|
# Find resources at: page.items
end
# More explicit version:
page = sync.first_page
until sync.completed?
page = sync.next_page
end
Or directly iterative over all resources:
sync.each_item do |resource|
# ...
end
When a sync is completed, the next sync url can be read from the Sync or SyncPage object:
sync.next_sync_url
Please note that synchronization entries come in all locales, so make sure, you supply a :default_locale property to the client configuration, when using the sync feature. This locale will be returned by default, when you call Entry#fields
. The other localized data will also be saved and can be accessed by calling the fields method with a locale parameter:
first_entry = client.sync(initial: true, type: 'Entry').first_page.items.first
first_entry.fields('de-DE') # Returns German localizations
- When an entry has related entries that are unpublished, they still end up in the resource as unresolved links. We consider this correct, because it is in line with the API responses and our other SDKs. However, you can use the workaround from issue #60 if you happen to want this working differently.
If you're a 0.x
or a 1.x
user of this gem, and are planning to migrate to the current 2.x
branch.
There are a few breaking changes you have to take into account:
Contentful::Link#resolve
andContentful::Array#next_page
now require aContentful::Client
instance as a parameter.Contentful::CustomResource
does no longer exist, custom entry classes can now inherit fromContentful::Entry
and have proper marshalling working.Contentful::Resource
does no longer exist, all resource classes now inherit fromContentful::BaseResource
.Contentful::Entry
andContentful::Asset
inherit fromContentful::FieldsResource
which is a subclass ofContentful::BaseResource
.Contentful::DynamicEntry
does no longer exist, if code checked against that base class, it should now check againstContentful::Entry
instead.Contentful::Client#dynamic_entry_cache
(private) has been extracted to it's own class, and can be now manually cleared by usingContentful::ContentTypeCache::clear
.Contentful::BaseResource#sys
andContentful::FieldsResource#fields
internal representation for keys are now snake cased to match the instance accessors. E.g.entry.fields[:myField]
previously had the accessorentry.my_field
, now it isentry.fields[:my_field]
. The value in both cases would correspond to the same field, only change is to unify the style. If code accessed the values through the#sys
or#fields
methods, keys now need to be snake cased.- Circular references are handled as individual objects to simplify marshalling and reduce stack errors, this introduces a performance hit on extremely interconnected content. Therefore, to limit the impact of circular references, an additional configuration flag
max_include_resolution_depth
has been added. It is set to 20 by default (which corresponds to the maximum include level value * 2). This allows for non-circular but highly connected content to resolve properly. In very interconnected content, it also allows to reduce this number to improve performance. For a more in depth look into this you can read this issue. #inspect
now offers a clearer and better output for all resources. If your code had assertions based on the string representation of the resources, update to the new format<Contentful::#{RESOURCE_CLASS}#{additional_info} id="#{RESOURCE_ID}">
.
For more information on the internal changes present in the 2.x release, please read the CHANGELOG
Copyright (c) 2014 Contentful GmbH - Jan Lelis. Copyright (c) 2016 Contentful GmbH - David Litvak.
See LICENSE.txt for further details.