suitor

suitor is a Rails 4.1 web application for tracking your job applications. It allows you to track what jobs you've applied for, when you did it, what your cover letter was, and encourages you to follow-up and track the entire application process.

Installation / Setup

suitor is a Rails app (built with Rails 4.1 and developed mostly on OS X using Ruby 2.1), so you'll need to have Ruby installed. After that, run:

gem install bundler rails

To get bundler and rails installed. After that, check out suitor and install its dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/sarahsemark/suitor.git
cd suitor
bundle install

Now you're ready to start hacking on suitor! Instead of running migrations one-by-one when you start developing, you're better off running rake db:setup This will install the admin user for you as well as run all the initial migrations. You can use a custom email for the admin user by specifying an environment variable:

ADMIN_EMAIL=youremail@gmail.com ADMIN_PASSWORD=yourpassword rake db:setup

Finally, to run the rails server:

rails server

Now your development version of suitor is available at localhost.

Email configuration

When in production mode, any emails generated by the system will be output to the Rails console. If you need to test mail delivery and/or output more vigorously, you can also use MailCatcher or Mandrill to test delivery. (Note that emails will still be output to the Rails console even when using one of these delivery methods, so you'll always be able to test there. )

MailCatcher

I recommend installing the MailCatcher gem for the most straightforward test environment. To avoid conflicts, the gem isn't included in this repo's Gemfile, so you'll need to install it to your machine.

Run gem install mailcatcher to install the gem to your machine. To start using MailCatcher, run mailcatcher and add MAILCATCHER=true to your .env file, and you're good to go!

Open up a browser tab to http://localhost:1080/. All mails sent by Rails will turn up there. Magic!

Mandrill

Mandrill is used to deliver mails in production, so you can use it to replicate that environment as closely as possible. You'll need access to a Mandrill account--they're free for under 12,000 emails a month, and you can set up a test API key that doesn't count against your monthly quota (but won't deliver the email directly).

Once you have an account set up, just add the following lines to your .env file:

MANDRILL_USERNAME={YOUR-EMAIL}
MANDRILL_PASSWORD={YOUR-API-KEY}

Make sure that MAILCATCHER is set to false (or anything other than true, really) as Rails will default to using MailCatcher before Mandrill.

After changing environment variables, make sure to restart your Rails server so that changes are applied!

Using the blog

The blog in suitor is powered by Jekyll. To create a new blog post, use the rake blog command:

rake blog:post['My New Post'] creates a new post with today's date
rake blog:post['Blog post title', 2014-09-21] if you need to set a particular date

If you're using ZSH, you may get an error trying to pass parameters; read this article for a fix: http://mikeballou.com/blog/2011/07/18/zsh-and-rake-parameters/

License information

Mail templates based on the always fantastic MailChimp's email blueprints, originally licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Background patterns from my go-to resource, the Subtle Patterns library, also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

sarahmonster / suitor

readme