Book Expedition

Book Expedition serves the avid reader who is interested in travel. Users can enter destinations to which they would like to travel, and the application will send out an API request to Flickr to retrieve an image representative of that destination to show to the user. At the same time, the app will retrieve a list of books that are related to that destination from the Goolge Books API, and the user can add those books to his/her reading list. Users can also take notes on their destinations to help plan their travel itineraries.

The project uses the following libraries and frameworks:

React, React Router
D3
AJAX
Javascript
Ruby on Rails
Materialize CSS

Demo

For a live demo of the site, please visit: Book Expedition.

Setup

The app uses Ruby 2.3.1 and was developed on Ruby on Rails 5.0.0.1. React is served up in Node.js using webpack 1.13.2.

To install, please run the following in your terminal:

Set up Rails

git clone https://github.com/jeffreyfriedman/book_expedition.git
cd book_expedition
bundle install
rake db:create
rake db:migrate

Set up Webpack

npm install

To retrieve images from Flickr, you will need to sign up for a Flickr API key. Once you have your Flickr API key, create a .env file in the root directory, and add your Flickr API key with the following format:

FLICKR_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY>

Running the application

To run Book Expedition, please run the following commands in your terminal from the book_expedition directory:

rails s
npm start

Now open your browser and enter localhost:3000 in your address bar.

Testing

To run the test suite, please enter the following command from the book_expedition root directory:

rspec