README

Here are the steps I used to configure the project. Everything mentioned in this installation process has already been done/configured. This text is purely to document the process...I'll probably just move it to a blogpost once I'm finished.

Installation

New project

create the application

$ rails new baccroad-web -d mysql

generate the database

$ rake db:create db:migrate

Install Piggybak

add the following gems to the Gemfile

gem 'piggybak'
gem 'cancan'

install the bundle and and install piggybak from the command prompt

$ bundle install
$ piggybak install

RailsAdmin and Devise are both installed with the Piggybak installation. I'm using CanCan for authorization so I added that gem to the Gemfile as well.

Configure the Devise Mailer

Devise uses a mailer as a part of the authentication process. default_url_options needs to be set appropriately for the different environments. I added the following line for my development environment in config/environments/development.rb:

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: 'localhost:3000' }

Generate a devise user

$ rails generate devise user

Rails creates a user model and configures it with Devise modules. It also creates a migration file located in db/migrate/devise_create_users.rb.

$ rake db:migrate

This tells rails to create a table called users.

install piggybak migrations

$ rake piggybak:install:migrations
$ rake db:migrate

Uncomment the following lines in config/initializers/rails_admin.rb

config.authenticate_with do
    warden.authenticate! scope: :user
  end
  config.current_user_method(&:current_user)

**WARNING: There may be an existing add_devise_to_users.rb migration. I deleted this as it looked like a duplicate to devise_create_users.rb

**WARNING: I ran into an error where piggybak_line_item table does not exist. I found the add_price_to_line_item.rb migration and added this bit of code...

Piggybak::LineItem.class_eval do
      self.table_name = 'line_items'
    end

**WARNING: There is a migration for a rearchitecture of the line_item. It's unclear to me why both the rearchitecture migration and original line_item migration are both in place, unless the creator is just unaware that the rearchitecture migration causes errors when it tries to recreate the created_at and updated_at columns in the table. To get past this error I commented out the following in the line_item_rearchitecture.piggybak.rb file

=begin
    change_table(:line_items) do |t|
      t.timestamps
    end
=end

Verify sign-up pages

By default, devise created the following pages:

http://localhost:3000/users/sign_up

http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in

Add login links to the landing page

I created a partial file app/views/layouts/_login.html.erb with following content:

<% if signed_in? %>
    Logged in as <%= current_user.email %>.
    <%= link_to "Logout", destroy_user_session_path, method: :delete %>
    | <%= link_to "Admin", '/admin' %>
<% else %>
    <%= link_to "Login", new_user_session_path %> | <%= link_to "Sign up now!", new_user_registration_path %>
<% end %>

To add it to my other views, I added the following to app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:

<%= render partial: 'layouts/login' %>

Add role to User model

$ rails g migration add_role_to_users role:string

The following was output to the terminal:

	invoke  active_record
	create    db/migrate/20140531165029_add_role_to_users.rb

I added the following to the migration created above:

class AddRoleToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
    def change
        add_column :users, :role, :string
 
        User.create! do |u|
            u.email     = 'cbynum@gmail.com'
            u.password    = 'admin123'
            u.role = 'administrator'
        end
    end
end

I excuted the migration to create an example administrator user with email cbynum@gmail.com and password admin123.

$ rake db:migrate

To access this role, I added the following method to app/models/user.rb

def role?(r)
    role.include? r.to_s
  end

Add Devise Views

Devise comes with some views OOTB that I can use for customization. Here is the line to generate them:

$ rails generate devise:views

Create the Landing Page

$ rails generate controller home index

Then added this line to config/routes.rb

root 'home#index'

Add Flash Messages

I added the tags for flash messages to app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

<p class="notice"><%= notice %></p>
<p class="alert"><%= alert %></p>

Configure CanCan

At this point anyone should be able to access the administration portion of the site at

http://localhost:3000/admin

At this point I locked down that portion of the website so that only site adminstrators can access it.

For authorization I used the cancan gem. The permissions are driven through an ability class that can be generated from the command line as follows:

$ rails generate cancan:ability

I had to edit the ability class at app/models/ability.rb

def initialize(user)

    if user && user.role?(:administrator)
      can :dashboard
      can :access, :rails_admin
      can :manage, [User]
      can :manage, Piggybak.config.manage_classes.map(&:constantize)
      Piggybak.config.extra_abilities.each do |extra_ability|
        can extra_ability[:abilities], extra_ability[:class_name].constantize
      end
    end

I also had to edit the rails_admin configuration at config/initializers/rails_admin.rb to tell my app to use cancan with rails_admin.

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.authorize_with :cancan
end

Integrating with Piggybak

How to make use of the most basic of integration points with the piggybak gem (how to sell an item), is outlined pretty well in the [http://www.piggybak.org/documentation.html#integration](piggybak integration points documentation).

acts_as_orderer and acts_as_sellable are the two most rudimentary integration points. Our user model will act as the orderer, and I needed to create a product (or item) model to have something to sell.

user model now looks like...

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :confirmable, :lockable, :timeoutable and :omniauthable
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable

  acts_as_orderer
        
  def role?(r)
    role.include? r.to_s
  end
end

then i generated a product model...

$ rails generate model product name:string description:text

after adding the piggybak integration, product looks like...

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_sellable
end

run db migrations to create the new products table

$ rake db:migrate

we'd like to be able to add and remove products from the rails_admin console, so I needed to update cancan's ability class with the proper permissions

can :manage, [Product]

after restarting the server, you should now be able to see the Products model in the rails_admin console

Now, to get the attributes that come with piggybak's sellable models there is no longer a need to add attr_accessible :piggybak_sellable_attributes to the model class. This will no longer work for the mass copy of attributes in rails 4. What's needed is to add the following to rails_admin.rb:

config.model Product do
    list do
      field :name
      field :piggybak_sellable
    end
    edit do
      field :name
      field :piggybak_sellable
    end
  end

You actually have to mount the piggybak engine. This may be common sense to experienced rails developers, but it took me a few hours to figure out why the tags like 'add_cart' weren't working. Add the following ot routes.rb

mount Piggybak::Engine => '/checkout', :as => 'piggybak'

TODO

Add variant support

Project Details

User Accounts

username: admin@baccroad.com password: 'admin123' role: administrator

username: customer@baccroad.com password: 'customer123' role: customer

cabynum/baccroad-web