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KITURA

Announcing Kitura 2.8 and more

By David Jones

Created on 2019-08-11

We’re excited to announce the release of Kitura 2.8, alongside a number of other releases and improvements to the Kitura ecosystem.

Kitura 2.8

Kitura 2.8 adds compatibility with Swift 5.1, and comes with a range of improvements and bug fixes, many of which are community requests and contributions. You can find full information in the GitHub release notes.

Logging with swift-log

In a previous article, we described how LoggerAPI can be set up to direct Kitura’s logging output to swift-log. With Kitura 2.8, a new convenience function Kitura.logTo(myLogger) makes it easy to direct all of Kitura’s log output to swift-log, without needing to import (or declare a dependency on) the LoggerAPI package in your code.

HeliumLogger can now be used as a LogHandler logging backend for swift-log.

Improvements to server startup and listening

You can now detect failure when starting a Kitura server through the process exit code – for example, when the server’s port is already in use. By default, Kitura.run() will now terminate the process with a non-zero status in the event that a server fails to start. To handle failure yourself, a new API Kitura.startWithStatus() -> Int has been introduced, which returns the number of servers that failed to start.

Listening on a specific address is now possible – an optional onAddress: String parameter has been added to Kitura.addHTTPServer. This allows a Kitura server to be exposed only on a specific network – for example, localhost – rather than listening on all adapters.

Easy cookies

We’ve also made it easier to add cookies to a response, by including a convenience response.addCookie() function. This removes a lot of the boilerplate code otherwise required to work with Foundation’s HTTPCookie type:

router.get("/bakery") {request, response, next in
    response.status(HTTPStatusCode.OK)
    response.addCookie(name: "variant", value: "gluten-free", domain: "my.biz", path: "/", otherAttributes: [.isSecure(true)])
    next()
}

Single-page applications

Support for single-page applications has been added. StaticFileServer can now be configured to serve a default file (for example, /index.html) if the requested path is not found.

New features in the Kitura ecosystem

Beyond these core Kitura improvements, we’d like to highlight some other new features we’ve been working on:

JWT Authentication

Use of JSON web tokens for authentication has become increasingly popular – we recently released Kitura-CredentialsJWT which enables JWT authentication for Codable routes, and have added support for supplying JWT authentication tokens in KituraKit.

Read more in: JWT authentication using KituraKit.

Event Streams support with SwiftKafka

We recently released SwiftKafka, a Swift package for producing and consuming events from an Apache Kafka platform. SwiftKafka is a standalone library and does not require Kitura, but they work well together!

Read more in: Introducing SwiftKafka: Accessing Event Streams in Swift

Documentation

The “Learn” section of kitura.dev has been updated with: