Hello world with Genie

Here are a few examples to quickly get you started with building Genie web apps.

Running Genie interactively at the REPL or in Jupyter

The simplest use case is to configure a routing function at the REPL and start the web server. That's all that's needed to run your code on the web:

Example

julia> using Genie, Genie.Router

julia> route("/hello") do
          "Hello World"
       end

julia> up()

The route function (available in the Router module) defines a mapping between a URL ("/hello") and a Julia function which will be automatically invoked to send the response back to the client. In this case we're sending back the string "Hello World".

That's all! We have set up an app, a route, and started the web server. Open your favourite web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/hello to see the result.


HEADS UP

Keep in mind that Julia JIT-compiles. A function is automatically compiled the first time it is invoked. The function, in this case, is our route handler serving the request. This will make the first response slower as it also includes compilation time. But once the function is compiled, for all the subsequent requests, it will be super fast!


Developing a simple Genie script

Genie can also be used in custom scripts, for example when building micro-services with Julia. Let's create a simple Hello World micro-service.

Start by creating a new file to host our code -- let's call it geniews.jl

julia> touch("geniews.jl")

Now, open it in the editor:

julia> edit("geniews.jl")

Add the following code:

using Genie, Genie.Router
using Genie.Renderer, Genie.Renderer.Html, Genie.Renderer.Json

route("/hello.html") do
  html("Hello World")
end

route("/hello.json") do
  json("Hello World")
end

route("/hello.txt") do
   respond("Hello World", :text)
end

up(8001, async = false)

We begun by defining 2 routes and we used the html and json rendering functions (available in the Renderer.Html and the Renderer.Json modules). These functions are responsible for outputting the data using the correct format and document type (with the correct MIME), in our case HTML data for hello.html, and JSON data for hello.json.

The third route serves text responses. As Genie does not provide a specialized method for sending text/plain responses, we use the generic respond function, indicating the desired MIME type. In our case :text, corresponding to text/plain. Other available MIME types shortcuts are :xml, :markdown, and :javascript. If you're looking for something else, you can always pass the full mime type as a string, ie "text/csv".

The up function will launch the web server on port 8001. This time, very important, we instructed it to start the server synchronously (that is, blocking the execution of the script), by passing the async = false argument. This way we make sure that our script stays running. Otherwise, at the end of the script, it would normally exit, killing our server.

In order to launch the script, run $ julia geniews.jl.

Batteries included

Genie readily makes available a rich set of features - you have already seen the rendering and the routing engines in action. But for instance, logging (to file and console) can also be easily triggered with one line of code, powerful caching can be enabled with a couple more lines, and so on.

The app already handles "404 Page Not Found" and "500 Internal Error" responses. If you try to access a URL which is not handled by the app, like say http://127.0.0.1:8001/not_here, you'll see Genie's default 404 page. The default error pages can be overwritten with custom ones and we'll see how to do this later on.