Tweetr
Tweetr lets you search for Twitter users and view their last 25 tweets. Try it out here
Libraries in Use
This is a popular wrapper for the Twitter API. It wasn't really necessary for the functionality in this app but since it's widely used and I have experience with it, I went with it.
devise
I used devise to get user auth set up quickly. Authentication is too important and easy to get wrong so I prefer using something like devise which is widely adopted.
postgreSQL
There are cooler databases but postgres is nice, I've used it a bunch, and I already had it installed on my machine.
rspec
Rspec has very easy to read syntax and I've only worked on projects that use it. I would like to try one of the other options (Test::Unit or MiniTest) at some point.
What I didn't use:
Bootstrap (or another frontend framework)
I debated whether I should use frontend framework or not. Even though I'm not a frontend wizard, I tend to be opinionated about UI and sometimes obsess over making the frontend look nice. Since we weren't supposed to spend too much time on this, I elected to use plain old HTML and CSS.
Design Choices
Aside from the controllers provided by devise, the app has a WelcomeController with an index action routed to the app root. I've added the devise authorize_user! method to the app's ApplicationController to protect routes from access by users without accounts. Actions can be whitelisted for public access by adding skip_before_filter to the appropriate controller/action.
The main functionality of the app is provided by the TweetsController's search action which takes a handle parameter and uses the twitter gem to locate the timeline for the user. I added some error handling since we're working with an external API and there are quite a few scenarios where errors could occur.
I did deliberate a bit about how exactly to structure the app's routing. I initially though of recreating the Twitter web client's routing scheme where the handle is a part of the route like twitter.com/yourhandle. Since the tweets aren't a resource owned by this app, I decided not to go that route and instead used the handle as a regular url parameter.
Setup
Local
Installation on OSX
1. Cloning the Repository
- Clone the tweetr repository
- Open Terminal and ‘cd’ into the repository’s folder.
2. Install Postgresql
brew install postgresql
3. Install the bundle
bundle install
4. Create the database
open config/database.yml- Change line 6 to your username
bundle exec rake db:setup
5. Add Twitter Credentials
You will need to have access to a Twitter API consumer key and consumer secret. Get yours here
- Add the key and secret to environmental variables with:
export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=<your key goes here>export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=<your secret goes here>.
6. Start the server
rails s- Visit http://localhost:3000/ .
Tests
Run all tests with rspec spec from the root folder.