REPL

The usual way to query an Oso knowledge base is through the API in your application’s language. But especially during development and debugging, it can be useful to interactively query a policy. So Oso provides a simple REPL (Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop). To run it, first make sure that you have installed Oso.

Once Oso is installed, launch the REPL from the terminal:

$ oso
query>

At the query> prompt, type a Polar expression and press Enter. The system responds with an answer, then prints the query> prompt again, allowing an interactive dialog:

query> 1 = 1
true
query> 1 = 2
false
query> x = 1 and y = 2
y => 2
x => 1
query> x = 1 or x = 2
x => 1
x => 2
query> x = 1 and x = 2
false

If the query can not be satisfied with the current knowledge base, the response is false. If the query is unconditionally true, then the response is true. Otherwise, each set of bindings that makes it true is printed; e.g., the third example above has one such set, the fourth has two.

To exit the REPL, type Ctrl-D (EOF).

Loading Policy and Application Code

To query for predicates defined in a policy, we’ll need to load the policy files. For instance, suppose we had just one allow rule for Alice, say, in the file alice.polar:

allow("alice@example.com", "GET", expense: Dictionary) if
    expense.id == 1;

Then we can run the REPL, passing that filename (and any others we need) on the command line:

$ oso alice.polar

And now we can use the rule that was loaded:

query> allow("alice@example.com", "GET", {name: "my expense", id: 1})
true

We can also use application objects in the REPL, but we have to load and register the defining modules before we launch the REPL. The easiest way to do that is to write a script that imports the necessary modules, plus oso, and then use the Oso.repl() API method to start the REPL:

require 'expense'
require 'user'

require 'oso'

OSO ||= Oso.new
OSO.register_class(Expense)
OSO.register_class(User)
OSO.load_files(["alice.polar"])
OSO.repl

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