OPL (Other People's Lines)

In the autumn of 2019, I decided to earn a broader understanding of the main features Ruby on Rails provides.

I'm inherently wary of building inert knowledge, and all-too-familiar with transfer of learning's thorniness.

As such, I set out an experiment: I'd (build a slightly-more-complex-than-CRUD app) in parallel to (reading through and, as appropriate, Ankifying the official Rails Guides).

I eventually settled on writing an app through which I could (manage and routinely email myself) quotes from a thousand-record plaintext file I'd been lackadaisically populating since my late... teens...

Shortly into the project, I realized two things:

1. [auth, full-text search, and frontend asset-management] would just never come easy to me w/o deliberate engagement; and

2. those RailsGuides are hefty: lot of content in there!

As such, I expanded my initial "MVC and a bit more" app-blueprint to include each of those fields, too (and, I'd hoped, better balance the coding-to-notetaking ratio.)

I'm writing this in early late January 2020, and by my private roadmap I'm maybe 2/3 of the way done. 😅 Hey, that went better than expected! Feature-complete(ish) is running on Heroku here. Just ping me if you want to access it as a user/manage daily emails: signup is currently disabled because, hey, toy-app budget.

I've got a couple posts, mostly detailing my cost-benefit decisions on handrolling certain aspects vs incorporating specific gems, up at ye olde miniblog. Otherwise, should you want to play around on a copy of your own, read on...

Setup for Local Development

• Install Ruby 2.6.7 and PostgreSQL 12
  • There's probably some leeway with the PostgreSQL version, but Heroku and Bundler, at least, certainly won't like other versions of Ruby unless tell them to.
  • I recommend grabbing Homebrew, then running
  • brew install rbenv
  • rbenv init
  • rbenv install 2.6.5
  • brew install postgresql
  • brew services start postgresql
• We deliberately want to install foreman outside the app's bundle -- run gem install foreman
• Pull from GitHub with that beautiful green Clone or download button above
• cd into the directory; bundle install and yarn install
• rails db:prepare -- this is Rails 6, baby; we can get idempotent!
• Possibly both bundle exec rails webpacker:install then yarn install, but likely just the latter: try it first
• Set up db extensions:
  • psql opl_development, then (from within the db client) run:
  • opl_development=# select * from pg_available_extensions;
  • opl_development=# CREATE EXTENSION pgcrypto;
• Create at least one admin account, via e.g.
  • rails c
  • irb(main):001:0> User.create!(name: 'Whatever', email: '[email protected]', password: 'my_arbitrary_password', password_confirmation: 'my_arbitrary_password', admin: true, activated: true) in console to create admin
• Finally, run foreman start to spin up your local version, and navigate to http://localhost:5000/!
• NB if you encounter a No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - tmp/pids/server.pid (Errno::ENOENT), then either
  • Run rails s once (and, upon hitting localhost:3000, exit) or
  • Manually mkdir tmp/pids.

Setup for Remote Deployment

• heroku create
• git push heroku master
• heroku run rake db:migrate
• heroku addons:
  • heroku addons:create sendgrid:starter
  • heroku addons:create scheduler:standard
• Set host in production.rb to your own Heroku site
• If you want others to sign up to your site, set allow_signups in production.rb to true (note this *could* make it possible for you to exceed your free-tier limits, especially given the SendGrid add-on's ceiling of 400 emails/month.)
• Finally, in the Heroku Scheduler dashboard...
  • If you want to actually receive a daily quote by email, set rake send_qotd_email to run sometime in the wee hours of the AM (careful with UTC offset; this may end up being like 9AM by scheduler-time if you're in e.g. CST/CDT)
  • If you plan to add new quotes and would like them to be added in semi-randomized sequence to that email queue, set rake populate_send_at_date_for_quotes (also likely best early in the AM, with the same UTC-offset caveat as above.)
  • If you set either of the above daily jobs, also set curl #{my_heroku_app_url} to run ~30 min after rake send_qotd_email, to wake up the web dyno (and, by extension, its follower worker dyno... which will then pick up any newly-queued jobs.)

Setup for Super-Fancy (Local) Docker Usage

• Checkout the docker-demo branch

• Add the following keys to config/database.yml:

  default: &default  
    # ...
    host: <%= ENV['POSTGRES_HOST'] %>
    database: <%= ENV['POSTGRES_NAME'] %>
    port: <%= ENV['POSTGRES_PORT'] || 5432 %>
    username: <%= ENV['POSTGRES_USER'] %>
    password: <%= ENV['POSTGRES_PASSWORD'] %>

• Create a top-level .env file, and add:

  POSTGRES_HOST=database
  POSTGRES_NAME=opl_development
  POSTGRES_USER=#{whatever_you_want}
  POSTGRES_PASSWORD=#{whatever_you_want}
  RAILS_ENV=development
  

• docker-compose build

• docker-compose up

• docker-compose run web rails db:prepare

• Navigate over to localhost:3000!

Note that, if you (like me) are developing on a mid-2010's MacBook Air, this version will run significantly slower than the above native build. But hey, I had to know that I could convert it over...