Ruby HTTP Clients in 2025

27th Feb 2025 | Tags: blog coding

At the dayjob, we do payments, both credit card and bank transfers. Over the years, I’ve done over a dozen integrations to support the banks our customers use, using a mix of HTTP and SFTP.

The latest one we had was working with a bank that used an HTTP API to submit transactions, but was extremely picky about how the request was made. We needed to make an HTTP call with:

  • a custom Authorization header format (literally Basic auth but with a different name)
  • a custom (nonstandard) header
  • a multipart form data field with a required content-type
  • a separate multipart file upload

After massaging our request enough to get it working with Net::HTTP, I thought I’d give some other options a shot for comparison.

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Git Archaeology

22nd Apr 2020 | Tags: git

Recently at work we passed a major milestone on our codebase, and I wanted to see if I could run some analysis over time on authorship and see how long some early contributors’ work stuck around in the product.

A bit of experimentation and random googling left me with these three scripts.

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Git Rebase by Example

20th Jun 2017 | Tags: git

Today at work, I determined that my current work in progress branch was going to want to be merged into production ahead of our next scheduled merge/deploy of master. To make it easier to merge into our production branch for a hot-fix deploy, I want to have the branch based off production instead of master.

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No More Bundle Exec

6th Sep 2012 | Tags: programming ruby

Update 2023: Just use direnv with layout ruby.

Bundler is pretty darn good. Installing all your gems globally sucks. bundle install --path does a great job of fixing that but it means you need to bundle exec any shell commands you want to run, which again sucks. There are lots of attempts to fix this, but they’re all fairly convoluted.

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Joining Git Repositoires

15th May 2012 | Tags: git

At work, we provide an API for our app and maintain web-based documentation for said API. We originally had the documentation in a separate git repo, but as it makes much more sense to maintain the docs directly alongside the code it documents we wanted to merge the two repositories. This was done in two steps.

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