Hello,

I am trying to use mint to make some http requests with Elixir, and reading the docs I wrote the following code.

It works fine (for basic GET requests and everything is hardcoded, it’s normal, just a test) but it seems a bit to much to use a library.

Questions at the end of the post.

defmodule HTTP do
  @empty_state %{data: [], done: false}

  def run do
    with {:ok, conn} <- Mint.HTTP.connect(:http, "httpbin.org", 80),
         {:ok, conn, _ref} <- Mint.HTTP.request(conn, "GET", "/", [], nil) do
      handle_response(conn, @empty_state)
    end
  end

  defp handle_response(conn, state) do
    receive do
      message ->
        case Mint.HTTP.stream(conn, message) do
          {:ok, conn, responses} ->
            case Enum.reduce(responses, state, &handle_res/2) do
              # Loop ends here
              %{done: true} = state -> {:ok, state}
              %{done: false} = state -> handle_response(conn, state)
            end

          {:error, _, reason, _} ->
            {:error, reason}

          :unknown ->
            exit({:unexpected, message})
        end
    end
  end

  defp handle_res({:status, _, status}, state),
    do: Map.put(state, :status, status)

  defp handle_res({:headers, _, headers}, state),
    do: Map.put(state, :headers, headers)

  defp handle_res({:data, _, data}, state),
    do: Map.update!(state, :data, fn acc -> [data | acc] end)

  defp handle_res({:done, _}, state) do
    Map.update!(state, :data, fn acc ->
      acc
      |> :lists.reverse()
      |> Enum.join("")
    end)
    |> Map.put(:done, true)
  end
end

Task.async(fn -> HTTP.run() end)
|> Task.await()
|> case do
  {:ok, state} ->
    state
    |> Map.get(:data)
    |> IO.puts()

  other ->
    IO.inspect(other, pretty: true)
end

A quick note : I intend to use this from a GenServer, and I have no concerns about performance for this project, so to avoid handling messages, I will spawn a Task to handle the request, so I do not care about the request reference or :unknown messages. Also I know there are other responses possibles.

But again I do not expect other messages.

Questions

• Is my code :ok ? I’ll take any remarks.
• Am I expected to do that to use this library ?
• Do you think mint should provide a helper like this for basic single requests ?
• If I got it right, connect/3 is separated from request/5 for connection reuse. Can I do multiple requests with the same conn ? And if yes, should I use the conn from connect() or the last updated one ?

Thank you !