Blogament: A Ruby repository from AimeeKnight

Blogament

Blogament is a Rails Engine designed to provide its host with blogging and commenting features.

Getting started

Instructions for installing and mounting.

Installing Blogament

Blogament works with Rails 4.1.1 onwards. You can add it to your Gemfile with:

gem 'blogament', :git => 'git://github.com/AimeeKnight/Blogament.git'

Run the bundle command to install it.

After adding Blogament to your Gemfile you need to copy over Blogament's migrations and generate your configuration initializer:

rails g blogament:install

That will generate a file at config\initializers\blogament.rb, mount the engine inside you app in routes.rb, and copy over blogament's migration files. You will then need to run rake db:migrate as usual.

Configuration

In order for your app's users to 'have many' blogs and comments, you'll need to set your user object (as a string) as Blogament's author class inside the blogament initializer :

Rails.application.config.before_initialize do
  Blogament.author_class = "User"
end

I have gone ahead and assumed your author class is a user, but you are free to pass any Active Record model as a string. Blogament will then take the string "User", call constantize on it, and set up the post's relation.

Note: You must pass your user object as a string, due to the way engines load their configuration files. Without the host's class passed as a string, Ruby will throw an errow since the class will initially be undefined.

The blog's default route is set to /blog. You can set this to something else if you'd like.

mount Blogament::Engine, at: "/blog"

Finally, Blogament needs to know who can create posts and who can't. In order for Blogament to place nice with your current authentication implementation, you'll need to implement the following on you user model:

def can_blog?
  # responds with true or false
end

Security

Blogament assumes your sessions will have a current_user object. If you don't have this currently, it will need to be implemented.

Rails Console

Posts and comments need to be accessed via their namespace. For example:

Blogament::Post.find(1)

Views

First, as with the current_user method, it's assumed that your user model with have an email property. If not, you will need to add one.

Blogs listed on the index and show page will display a 'by line' which identifies the blogs author. It's up to you to tell blogament what you'd like the by line to display. In order to do so, you'll also need to implement the following in your model:

def by_line
  #you may want to return the models name, or maybe their email.
end

Blogament's views can be customized as well. For instance, in order to customize the layout for the posts index page you can create a file at app/views/blogament/posts/index.html.erb, and it will be used in place of the default view provided.

Routing

To access a route provided by blogament, you will need to call your route on the Blogament object. For instance;

blogament.posts_path

will take you to posts#index.

Deployment

S3 Image Upload with Heroku

Blogament is designed to be used in conjunction with Carrierwave, Fog, and Amazon S3. While Blogament takes care of the ImageUploader class and all necessary dependencies (no need to add anything besides blogament to your Gemfile), it's up to you to configure Carrierwave by creating a file at /config/initializers/carrierwave.rb. The configuration has worked beautifully for me when deploying to Heroku, and using the Figaro gem to store my environment variables.

 CarrierWave.configure do |config|
  if Rails.env.test?
    config.storage = :file
    config.enable_processing = false
  elsif Rails.env.development?
    config.storage = :file
    config.enable_processing = true
  else
    config.storage = :fog
    config.fog_credentials = {
      :provider               => 'AWS',                        # required
      :aws_access_key_id      => ENV['S3_KEY'],                # required
      :aws_secret_access_key  => ENV['S3_SECRET'],             # required
    }
    config.fog_directory      = ENV['S3_BUCKET_NAME']          # required
  end
end

Elastic Search and Heroku

Note: It is assumed you have Elasticsearch set up in development. Blogament utilizes Elasticsearch for full text database queries, and has been tested with bonsai on Heroku. Setup is as follows:

heroku addons:add bonsai
heroku config:add ELASTICSEARCH_URL=`heroku config:get BONSAI_URL`

Then deploy and reindex:

heroku run rake searchkick:reindex CLASS=Blogament::Post

Sidekiq & Unicorn

To make image upload faster on Heroku, Blogament uses Sidekiq to process S3 image upload in the background. With that said, Blogament works by installing Unicorn in your application as follows:

Gemfile

gem 'unicorn'

/config/unicorn.rb

worker_processes Integer(ENV["WEB_CONCURRENCY"] || 3)
timeout 30
preload_app true

before_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn master intercepting TERM and sending myself QUIT instead'
    Process.kill 'QUIT', Process.pid
  end

  defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.disconnect!
end

after_fork do |server, worker|
  Signal.trap 'TERM' do
    puts 'Unicorn worker intercepting TERM and doing nothing. Wait for master to send QUIT'
  end

  defined?(ActiveRecord::Base) and
    ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection
end

Finally, you'll create a Procfile in the root of your application.

web: bundle exec unicorn -p $PORT -c ./config/unicorn.rb
worker: sidekiq -q carrierwave

Note: It's assumed you have Redis installed in development. To tell Sidekiq to listen for Carrierwave, start Sidekiq with:

sidekiq -q carrierwave

On Heroku, install the Redis add on with:

heroku addons:add redistogo

License

Blogament is released under the MIT License.