An oEmbed consumer library written in Ruby, letting you easily get embeddable HTML representations of supported web pages, based on their URLs. See oembed.com for more about the protocol.

gem install ruby-oembed

Get information about a URL via an OEmbed::Provider. This library comes with many Providers built right in, to make your life easy.

resource = OEmbed::Providers::Youtube.get("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BYXBC8WQ5k")
resource.video? #=> true
resource.thumbnail_url #=> "http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/2BYXBC8WQ5k/hqdefault.jpg"
resource.html #=> <<-HTML
  <object width="425" height="344">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2BYXBC8WQ5k?fs=1"></param>
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
    <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2BYXBC8WQ5k?fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
  </object>
HTML

If you’d like to use a provider that isn’t included in the library, it’s easy to create one. Just provide the oEmbed API endpoint and URL scheme(s).

my_provider = OEmbed::Provider.new("http://my.cool-service.com/api/oembed_endpoint.{format}")
my_provider << "http://*.cool-service.com/image/*"
my_provider << "http://*.cool-service.com/video/*"
resource = my_provider.get("http://a.cool-service.com/video/1") #=> OEmbed::Response
resource.provider.name #=> "My Cool Service"

To use multiple Providers at once, simply register them.

OEmbed::Providers.register(OEmbed::Providers::Youtube, my_provider)
resource = OEmbed::Providers.get("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BYXBC8WQ5k") #=> OEmbed::Response
resource.type #=> "video"
resource.provider.name #=> "Youtube"

Last but not least, ruby-oembed supports both oohEmbed and Embedly. These services are provider aggregators. Each supports a wide array of websites ranging from Amazon.com to xkcd.

This library works wonderfully on its own, but can get a speed boost by using 3rd party libraries to parse oEmbed data. To use a 3rd party Formatter, just be sure to require the library before ruby-oembed.

require 'json'
require 'xmlsimple'
require 'oembed'

OEmbed::Formatter::JSON.backend #=> OEmbed::Formatter::JSON::Backends::JSONGem
OEmbed::Formatter::XML.backend  #=> OEmbed::Formatter::XML::Backends::XmlSimple

The following, optional, backends are currently supported:

• The JSON implementation for Ruby

• Rails’ ActiveSupport::JSON (confirmed to work with Rails 3.0.x and should work with Rails 2.0+)

• XmlSimple

Code for the ruby-oembed library is hosted on GitHub.

# Get the code.
git clone git://github.com/judofyr/ruby-oembed.git
cd ruby-oembed
# Install all development-related gems.
gem install bundler
bundle install
# Run the tests.
rake specs

If you encounter any bug, feel free to create an Issue.

We gladly accept pull requests! Just fork the library and commit your changes along with relevant tests. Once you’re happy with the changes, send a pull request.

We do our best to keep our tests green

Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this gem, both large and small:

• Aris Bartee

• Todd Fisher

• Hans de Graff

• Magnus Holm (original author of this library)

• Alex Kessinger

• Ryan Richards

• Colin Shea

• Kyle Slattery

• Marcos Wright-Kuhns (current maintainer)

This code is free to use under the terms of the MIT license.