isharah-api

This repo includes the Ruby on Rails api which serves as backend for ishara.com.

Getting started

To get your repo up and running you will need to install docker and docker-compose.

Then run the following 3 commands (You may need to sudo):

  docker-compose build
  docker-compose run web rails db:create
  docker-compose run web rails db:schema:load
  docker-compose run web rails db:seed
  docker-compose up

1. docker-compose build builds the docker container which contains all the project's actual dependencies and a bunch of other utilities, so it may take a while the first time, and anytime you break it really really badly.
2. docker-compose run web rails db:create this creates the database
3. docker-compose run web rails db:schema:load this runs all migrations to load the schema in schema.rb and all the tables we have in it so far.
4. Optionally docker-compose run web rails db:seed this seeds the database with the data in db/seed.rb.
5. docker-compose up this brings the server up and any other needed background services

If all everything went well, the terminal should say "Listening on port 3000" or something of that sort which means the server is running. If you open your browser and go to localhost:3000 you should see a "Hello" string and 200 OK response.

If you go to localhost:1080, you should see the mailcatcher interface which we will use to see the mails our api sends in the development environment. (such as signup confirmation, etc.)

If you go to localhost:3030/?url=swagger.yml#/, you should see the Swagger-UI documentation for our rails API.

Notes for development

Debugging

If you intend to use an interactive debugger (pry or byebug, etc.), instead of docker-compose up in step 3, you should run these two commands in succession:

  docker-compose up -d
  docker attach isharah-api_web_1

Rails commands

If you're new to Docker, you should know that the rails env won't be available outside the container. So any rails commands (rails c, rails g, rails db:migrate, etc.), or any command dependent on the gemfile installed won't work outside the container, because they weren't installed outside. Instead you need to use docker-compose exec web bash to open a bash shell inside your container to be able to run all the rails commands you're used to.

Dependencies

All our dependencies should be listed in Gemfile. When adding a new dependency, you'll need to rebuild the docker container as follows.

docker-compose up --build

Docker may eat up your disk space if you aren't careful. Commands such as docker images and docker ps -l will be useful to know what to remove, in case the rebuilds don't clean up after themselves.

Permissions

Using docker with rails on linux was a bit of a headache regarding file permissions and file ownership. For now, just sudo any of the commands that need extra permissions (the 3 commands in getting started may reply with permission denied), until we figure out a better solution. This hopefully shouldn't be any problem for macos or windows.

(I hope I got the terminology right there)

Play nice with Rubocop

The environment set up will automatically place a pre-commit hook that will run stylistic checks on the whole codebase before you commit. It's really recommended you use rubocop as plugin for the text editor you use, to be able to fix the style issues faster. This is to keep the code as consistent as possible.