Interface to Shopware with Perl

At work we often have the problem to migrate data to web shops or other applications.

Perl is a great help for task like this, get things done.

The possible methods to maintain data via Perl scripts are:

• manipulate the database, e.g. using DBIx::Class. This can be a maintenance hell, if the schema of the main application changes.
• compile CSV records, if the application can import it.
• use an API, if the application supports it.

In the case of Shopware an REST API exists, but the documentation targets PHP and suggests to use the PHP layers.

After some trial and error I got success using an ordinary web browser, entering an URL like this:

http://username:apikey@shop.local/api/articles

Should be straight forward with Mojo::UserAgent, but it returned errors.

Exploring the details it took some time to detect the header Authorization: Digest in the browser communication.

Fortunately with the help of search engines I found the module Mojo::UserAgent::DigestAuth which needed some trial and error to understand, but works like this:

use Mojo::UserAgent::DigestAuth;
use Mojo::UserAgent;

my $ua = Mojo::UserAgent->new;

# e.g. 'http://username:apikey@shop.local/api/articles'
my $url = $protocol . $user . ':' . $apikey . '@' . $host . $path . $object;

my $tx = $ua->$_request_with_digest_auth(get => $url);
my $value = $tx->res->json;

May this post help all the people having a problem with the Shopware API or with Mojo::UserAgent::DigestAuth.

Elasticsearch with Mojo::UserAgent

Trying to find a more flexible and scalable solution for my key-value backends with more than 10 millions of keys each, stored in read-only dictd now, I wanted to try Elasticsearch.

Installation on my development station (a MacBook Air) was easy.

Next step is a perlish interface.

There are modules on CPAN interfacing to Elasticsearch, but with tons of dependencies, and a lot of documentation to learn.

What's about using the JSON REST-API of Elasticsearch directly with one of the perlish user agents?

Having Mojolicious installed on all machines, and knowing Mojo::UserAgent very well, I gave it a try.

Some minutes later I had it working:

use Mojo::UserAgent;

my $ua = Mojo::UserAgent->new;

# insert a record
my $tx = $ua->post('http://localhost:9200/nomen/child' => json =>
  {
 "taxon"  => "Rosa",
 "rank"   => "Genus",
 "child"  => "Rosa canina",
 "system" => "gbif"
  }
);

# query
my $result = $ua->post('http://localhost:9200/_search' => json => {
    "query" => {
        "query_string" => {
            "query"  => "Spermophilus",
            "fields" => ["taxon","child"]
        }
    }
})->res->json;

It allows to use perl structures directly with the built-in JSON converter.

Easy and simple.

Next will be scalability and performance tests.