Geonames-Rails

Update 2

Converted the plugin into a gem

Copy this into your application's Rakefile:

Dir["#{Gem.searcher.find('geonames_rails').full_gem_path}/lib/tasks/*.rake"].each { |ext| load ext }

To generate the migration and models, use

rails generate geonames_rails:migration rails generate geonames_rails:models

And do do the magic, run

rake geonames_rails:pull # to download the data rake geonames_rails:load # to load it rake geonames_rails:run # to do both at once (use for heroku)

Thanks to Garrett Davis for converting it into Rails 3 and John Barton for making the thing in the first place.

Update

Updated the plugin for Rails 3 (v3.0.7 clean install)

Recoded Generators
Moved tasks/geonames_rails.rake to lib/tasks/geonames_rails.rake
Added force_encoding to correct encoding errors in puller.rb

Thanks to John Barton (joho) for saving me some time, hopefully this fork does the same.

Getting Started

I need a decent plugin that can do the following things with the geonames database

generate a standard db migration
pull down the required geonames files from the web
load those geonames files in the db (assuming a schema from the migration)
generate me my models for free (but leave them in models so i can hack them up later)

Install the plugin by doing the following in your rails app root dir

script/plugin install git://github.com/joho/geonames-rails.git

You next step is to run the generators to give you the bare bones country/city models and the db migration

script/generate geonames_migration script/generate geonames_models

Once you've run that migration and got your models set up how you like you're right to pull down the data straight from the geonames server and into your database. It's as easy as one little command

rake geonames_rails:pull_and_load_data

Advanced Usage

OK, so you've had a bit of a play and decided one of a couple of things

the default fields i've chosen suck and you want more/less of them
you don't like the storage method i've chosen. maybe you want to use a document store - or something else

Well, you're covered. The method for writing out the country/city data is fully pluggable. All you need is a class that implements the following two methods

class MyCustomGeonamesWriter def write_country(country_mapping) end

def write_cities(country_code, city_mappings)
end

end

and then you can pass an instance of that class as the second argument to the geonames loader. See the rake task for an example.

Outstanding Tasks

TODO

add regions? (maybe, i'm not sure they're worth it)

DONE