JSON handling is a bit awkward in OCaml at the present time, and Dream will look into improving it in its first few releases. The example below shows manual JSON handling with Yojson. It can also be greatly simplified with ppx_yojson_conv.

let to_json request =

  match Dream.header "Content-Type" request with
  | Some "application/json" ->

    let%lwt body = Dream.body request in

    begin match Yojson.Basic.from_string body with
    | exception _ -> Lwt.return None
    | json -> Lwt.return (Some json)
    end

  | _ -> Lwt.return None

let () =
  Dream.run
  @@ Dream.logger
  @@ Dream.origin_referer_check
  @@ Dream.router [

    Dream.post "/"
      (fun request ->
        match%lwt to_json request with
        | None -> Dream.empty `Bad_Request
        | Some json ->

          let maybe_message =
            Yojson.Basic.Util.(member "message" json |> to_string_option) in
          match maybe_message with
          | None -> Dream.empty `Bad_Request
          | Some message ->

            `String message
            |> Yojson.Basic.to_string
            |> Dream.respond ~headers:["Content-Type", "application/json"]);

  ]
  @@ Dream.not_found

$ dune exec --root . ./json.exe

This example expects JSON of the form {"message": "some-message"}, and echoes the message as a JSON string. Let's test it immediately with both curl and HTTPie:

$ curl http://localhost:8080 \
    -H "Origin: http://localhost:8080" \
    -H "Host: localhost:8080" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --data '{"message": "foo"}'

"foo"

$ echo '{"message": "foo"}' | \
    http POST :8080 Origin:http://localhost:8080 Host:localhost:8080

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 5
Content-Type: application/json

"foo"

Security

Dream.origin_referer_check implements the OWASP Verifying Origin With Standard Headers CSRF protection technique. It doesn't protect GET requests, so they shouldn't do mutations. It also isn't good enough for cross-origin usage in its current form. But it is enough to do AJAX in small and medium web apps without the need for generating tokens.

This technique relies on that the browser will send matching Origin: (or Referer:) and Host: headers to the Web app for a genuine request, while, for a cross-site request, Origin: and Host: will not match — Origin: will be the other site or null. Try varying the headers in the curl and http commands to see the check in action, rejecting your nefarious requests!

Next steps:

f-static serves static files from the local file system.
g-upload receives files from an upload form.

Up to the tutorial index