Written Tutorial

Problem

You want a quick & dirty way to work with XQuery or SJS. Query Console is great for interactively building stuff and for queries, but sometimes the direct-to-filesystem cuts out QC middle man, and also with this approach you can do things with your output, like pipe it to a file, which is a pain with QC.

Solution

Applies to MarkLogic versions 8+

Put this in a file called “make-app”:

#!/bin/bash
ROOT=`pwd`
NAME=$1
PORT=$2
curl --digest --user admin:admin -X POST -Hcontent-type:application/json \
  -d"{\"server-name\":\"$NAME\",\"group-name\":\"Default\",\"server-type\":\"http\",\"content-database\":\"Documents\",\"port\":$PORT,\"root\":\"$ROOT\",\"authentication\":\"application-level\",\"default-user\":\"admin\"}" \
  https://localhost:8002/manage/v2/servers

Run it like this:

make-app TEST 9999

Now you create a file, say, x.xqy, and run it

curl --digest --user admin:admin https://localhost:9999/x.xqy

Required Privileges:

• https://marklogic.com/xdmp/privileges/manage-admin
• https://marklogic.com/xdmp/privileges/manage-admin

Discussion

This recipe uses the Management API to create a new application server that looks at the file system for source code. Specifically, it looks at the directory you’re in when you run the make-app script. The app server will use the Documents database for content; the app server name and port are specified as parameters to the script.

Notice that the authentication is set to “application-level” and the default user is set to “admin”. This effectively turns off security: the admin user can access all content and run all functions.

Once the app server has been created, you can save any file and easily run it with a curl command or even with a browser (using something like POSTman if you want to send requests with verbs other than GET).

The MarkLogic REST API requires an app server with a modules database, so this won’t work for testing out REST extensions or transforms.