HTTP data in Rails

October 12th, 2008 · Ton · Diari, English Linux, Rails, Variats No comments

One of the things done when a web application is done is collect the HTTP information contained in the request. I did some things in PHP5 and there was (and is) an environment variables named ‘$_SERVER’ which contained information collected by the web server about the request.

In rails, there is the array named ‘request.env’ which contains a lot of items with the http request information, for instance if you want to get the client ip address or the browser used you can use the sentences ‘client_ip = request.env["REMOTE_ADDR"]‘ and ‘client_browser = request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]‘.

A list of what is retrievable is :

  • SERVER_NAME
  • PATH_INFO
  • REMOTE_HOST
  • HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING
  • HTTP_USER_AGENT
  • SERVER_PROTOCOL
  • HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL
  • HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE
  • HTTP_HOST
  • REMOTE_ADDR
  • SERVER_SOFTWARE
  • HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE
  • HTTP_REFERER
  • HTTP_COOKIE
  • HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET
  • REQUEST_URI
  • SERVER_PORT
  • GATEWAY_INTERFACE
  • QUERY_STRING
  • REMOTE_USER
  • HTTP_ACCEPT
  • REQUEST_METHOD
  • HTTP_CONNECTION

Something simple, as everything contained in RoR :-)