Quick Start

Getting started with http4s is easy. Let's materialize an http4s skeleton project from its giter8 template:

# for Scala 2.x
$ sbt new http4s/http4s.g8 --branch 1.0

# for Scala 3
$ sbt new http4s/http4s.g8 --branch 1.0-scala3

Follow the prompts. For every step along the way, a default value is provided in brackets.

name : name of your project.

organization : the organization you publish under. It's common practice on the JVM to make this a domain you own, in reverse order (i.e., TLD first). io.github.username is also a fine choice.

package : by default, your organization followed by the project name.

sbt_version : the version of SBT for your generated project.

scala_version : the version of Scala for your generated project.

http4s_version : defaults to the latest stable release of http4s. See the versions page for other suggestions.

logback_version : the version of Logback for logging in your generated project.

At the end of the process, you'll see:

Template applied in ./quickstart

In addition to sbt build machinery, some Scala source files are generated:

$ cd quickstart
$ find src/main -name '*.scala'
./src/main/scala/com/example/quickstart/HelloWorld.scala
./src/main/scala/com/example/quickstart/QuickstartRoutes.scala
./src/main/scala/com/example/quickstart/Jokes.scala
./src/main/scala/com/example/quickstart/Main.scala
./src/main/scala/com/example/quickstart/QuickstartServer.scala

Main.scala defines a runnable object Main extends IOApp with an entry point method run which calls the stream method of the object QuickstartServer defined on QuickstartServer.scala. Starting ember, http4s' native server backend.

QuickStartRoutes has two route definitions. The helloWorldRoutes containing a simple HttpRoutes that responds to GET/hello/$USERNAME with a JSON greeting. Let's try it:

$ sbt run

Depending on the state of your Ivy cache, several dependencies will download. This is a good time to grab a beverage. When you come back, you should see a line similar to this:

[io-compute-1] INFO  o.h.e.s.EmberServerBuilderCompanionPlatform - Ember-Server service bound to address: [::]:8080

This indicates that ember is running our service on port 8080. Let's try out the hello world service with curl:

$ curl -i http://localhost:8080/hello/world
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2020 16:23:31 GMT
Content-Length: 26

{"message":"Hello, world"}

To shut down your server, simply press ^C in your console. Note that when running interactive SBT, ^C will kill the SBT process. For rapid application development, you may wish to add the sbt-revolver plugin to your project and starting the server from the SBT prompt with reStart.

With just a few commands, we have a fully functional app for creating a simple JSON service.