Social Development Centre

Introduction

This is the web API portion of the Social Development Centre Project for UW Blueprint.

This project was started in Fall 2019 and is currently in development.

Fall 2019 Team

Project Lead: Daniel Williams - @ddgwilli

Project Manager: Leonard Zhang - @leonardz

Designers:

Annie Xu
Carmen Lee

Developers:

Lee Ma - @lee-ma
Daniel Peng - @danielpeng2
Ritika Rao - @ritikarao
Megan Niu - @meganniu
Jayant Shrivastava - @jayshrivastava

Winter 2020 Team

Project Lead: Leon Ouyang - @LeozMaxwellJilliams

Project Manager: James Lu

Designer: Brandon Law

Developers:

Ainley Pena
Faizaan Madhani
Nim Wijetunga
Patrick Du
Stephanie Xu

Development Setup

Environment Setup

Pull the repository and navigate into the project root. Make sure Ruby and Bundler are installed.

# install dependencies
bundle install

Installing Docker:

Please refer to the offical docs at https://docs.docker.com/install/

Development DB Setup:

# pull the docker image
docker pull postgres

# run the docker container
# take note of the password here
docker run -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=sdcdev -p 5432:5432 -d postgres

# init the database and sample data
rails db:setup

# FYI: This is how to list running docker containers (add -a to list all continers).
docker ps

# FYI: This is how to start/stop containers. You should stop all your containers when you are not developing.
docker start <container id>
docker stop <container id>

Connecting to the Development DB

# connect to docker container
# find container name using `docker ps` (name is different from id)
# password was set in the command to run the container above
docker exec -it <container name> psql -h localhost -U postgres -d postgres

# go into the sdc database of the postgres server
\c sdc

# you can write any psql statements inside the sdc database 
SELECT * FROM questions;

# you can also use psql commands like this one which lists a table's schema
\d+ questions

Environment Variable Setup

# remove .template from .env.development.local.template and fill in .env.development.local, example values:
CORS_ORIGIN=http://localhost:3000
SEED_USER_EMAIL=test@test.com
SEED_USER_PASSWORD=password
DEVISE_JWT_SECRET_KEY=super_secret_secret_key

Authenticating Routes with Devise

# This project includes Devise for auth, add this line before the resource to require a user to be logged in:
before_action :authenticate_user!

Run the dev server

rails s

Deployment

Initial Deployment

This app can be best deployed using Heroku. Currently, it is running here. For a new deployment, begin by setting up Heroku account here and installing the Heroku CLI here.

This app is deployed using the Docker Container Registry on Heroku. To learn more about the Docker Registry go here. The documentation that informed this deployment methodology, can be found here. Consult it when troubleshooting.

Before starting, ensure that the Docker Daemon is running.

Begin by logging in:

heroku login

Inside the project folder, to create a new heroku project:

heroku create

OR, if you have an existing heroku project (which this project currently does):

heroku git:remote -a <app name>

The current app name is warm-hollows-93227.

This project uses a PostgreSQL database which will be provisioned using Heroku. This should be automatically provisioned when the app is first created, however, if it is not, consult the Heroku PostgreSQL docs here to set it up.

Then, login to the Docker Container Registry:

heroku container:login

Build the image and push to Container Registry:

heroku container:push web

Then release the image to your app:

heroku container:release web

Then, to migrate the database into Heroku's Postgres container, run:

heroku run rake db:migrate

Subsequent Deployments:

Subsequent deployments are much simpler, just run:

heroku container:push web
heroku container:release web

Occaisionally, you may need to remigrate the database if data has been reseeded:

heroku run rake db:migrate

Troubleshooting

(Windows) Bundle Install Fails Due to pg? Try the following:

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev
gem install pg  --   --with-pg-lib=/usr/lib
bundle install

Bundle Install fails because bundler cannot be found

If you get an error during dependency installation containing can't find gem bundler (>= 0.a) with executable bundle but bundle is installed, try

gem update --system
bundle install

This worked with Ruby 2.5.1 with rbenv on MacOS.

Database Errors in Production

Sometimes, the database in production may be not be working as expected. If reseeding or remigrating the data does not work, another (nuclear) option is to reset the database, which will drop it and reprovision it. Note that this deletes all the data from the database.

This can be done from the Heroku Postgres Dashboard or by using CLI:

heroku pg:reset DATABASE

After this, be sure to remigrate the database using:

heroku run rake db:migrate

info-waterloo-region/sdc-api