Rails, how do you access the raw request data at the absolute lowest level?

Question

When is the Rails request object available at the earliest time during the request lifecycle? Essentially, when is the request first available as a request object, and in which object? ActionDispatch?

Can you access request parameters from Tester::Application? If so, how? If not, what about using the environment? When is that information set?

Tereasaterebene

You need to clean up and clarify your question a bit. Are you asking how to get access to all request params during a controller action? If so, that's as easy as writing puts request in a controller action and looking at the rails console. – Gefen

This was a bit vague, but essentially, when is the request first available as a request object, in which object? ActionDispatch? etc – Tereasaterebene

Answer 1

The Rack webserver creates the request object and then ActionDispatch inherits from it. So essentially, you'd be able to access the Rack::Request or ActionDispatch::Request objects within the middleware of the app.

Rack::Request

https://github.com/rack/rack/blob/master/lib/rack/request.rb

ActionDispatch::Request

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/http/request.rb

Gefen

Answer 2

A middleware is probably the best way to access this data. I made a simple gem for setting up a raw HTTP request/response log in Rails using the classes mentioned in the accepted answer.

https://github.com/andrhamm/marcopolo

Putty

Thanks for making this. It's exactly what I needed to scrape out tokens from an api service so that I could hit it with curl. – Tedman

@JacobDalton no problem, please let me know how it works out for you or open an issue on the github page for ideas for enhancements – Putty