Roomy

A fully responsive P2P room booking app

This web platform enables you to search, book or advertise your room. Anytime and anywhere!

Technology Stack: Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, JavaScript/jQuery, SQLite DB

Prerequisites

• Make sure, to have Ruby installed.
• To handle different Ruby versions on the same machine, I recommend installing a Ruby version manager like rbenv.

Running the Application

• Fork the application
• Clone your fork to your machine via git clone link_to_forked_repo_here
• Optional: add this repo as upstream via git remote add upstream https://github.com/togiberlin/roomy.git
• Check remote repos origin and upstream via git remote -v
• Type bundle install to install dependencies
• Then enter rackup private_pub.ru -s thin -E production to allow some WebSocket real-time messaging magic to happen
• Check the Transactional Emails and PayPal Integration sections below
• In the last step, type bundle exec rails s to start the Rails server
• Open your browser on http://localhost:3000

Extra Features

Avatar

• Simply go to Gravatar and register.
• Gravatar is a service which lets you use a single avatar across multiple pages, e.g. GitHub, DisQus, Wordpress, Stackoverflow and more.
• When registering, make sure to use the same Gravatar account email.

Transactional E-Mails

• Transactional e-mails such as registration, account confirmation etc. are generated by the gem Devise
• Sending the automatically generated e-mail via SMTP can be done by e.g. Sendgrid
• Go to Sendgrid to register a new account with a free plan (30-day free trial)
• Sendgrid will ask for some personal details. Make sure to fill them out.
• Make sure to click on the confirmation email sent by SendGrid
• Go to roomy/config/application_example.yml and insert your Sendgrid username and password. Then, remove the _example from the filename. In the end, the filename should look like this: roomy/config/application.yml. This file is now on .gitignore.
• If you chose to skip this step, you can simply just find the confirmation link inside the Rails logs. Copy/paste the confirmation link into the browser, and the account is good to go!

Login with Facebook

• Go to developer.facebook.com and register
• Create an app called "Roomy"
• Add http://localhost:3000 to the URL whitelist
• Copy and paste your app-ID and app secret into roomy/config/application.yml

PayPal Integration

• Because our application runs on http://localhost:3000, there is no way that PayPal can send a payment confirmation to our app.
• There are 2 solutions. Deployment to e.g. Heroku, which requires some work. Way easier: using a webservice that allows connections to your localhost webapp.
• In order to allow connections to your localhost app, download Ngrok from here
• Unzip the file, right click on it and open it with Terminal. A complete message should appear
• If you don't have a PayPal account, register and open up a personal account here
• Go to developer.paypal.com and login
• Create an app called Roomy
• Go to the Sandbox test accounts page. There should be 2 accounts: one facilitator (business) and one buyer (private) account.
• Click on profile on the private account and change the password. Make sure, that the buyer account has a balance of 9999 EUR/USD
• Navigate to the download folder via cd ~/Downloads, then enter ./ngrok http 3000 to start the Ngrok server
• Ngrok displays now a link, with which the internet can reach your localhost application. Start your Rails server, and copy/paste the Ngrok link into the browser. Your webapp should appear on the internet!
• Make sure to add all configuration stuff into the roomy/config/application.yml file. It should look like this:

# PayPal integration
pp_facilitator_email: '[email protected]'
ngrok_notify_link: 'http://fs3442jd.ngrok.io/notify'
ngrok_return_link: 'http://fs3442jd.ngrok.io/show_trips'

Cleaning the DB

If you want to reset the database, simply run these commands

bundle exec rake db:drop        # delete entire SQLite database
bundle exec rake db:create      # create a new SQLite database
bundle exec rake db:migrate     # run migrations
bundle exec rake db:seed        # fill the DB with test users, rooms and room photos

Debugging

If you want to create a breakpoint, simply enter:

binding.pry

You can now jump through the code via

continue     # continue until next breakpoint
next         # go to next line of code
abort        # stop debugging

Improvement Points

The MVP is there, but there are improvement points.

• Design is currently based on Bootstrap. Redesigning the UI and giving the web app more of an individual look would be nice.
• Replacing all strings inside the view with I18n placeholder. Store all strings inside dedicated Yaml file. Localization into different languages is then very easy.
• Replacing Test::Unit with RSpec for more readable and documented tests. Write tests, where at least 90% of the code is triggered (high code coverage).
• Introducing Capybara and Cucumber for UI-testing and UI-test documentation.
• Add badges for static code analysis tools. E.g. syntax-check, style, security, code duplication etc.
• Continuos Integration. Automately trigger tests with e.g. Travis CI. All future pull requests muss pass all tests before merging. Green build-status badge is requirement for merging.
• Deploy under any environment without weird anomalies. Creating a docker image for easier deployment would be nice.
• With that Docker image, automate the process of deployment via e.g. Puppet, Chef, Ansible or Jenkins.
• Don't commit on master anymore. Create a develop branch. Work with pull requests. In short: use a proper branching strategy. Make code reviews necessary.
• In production, serve static content with Nginx to avoid unnecessary load.
• App currently uses Rails version 4.2.5. Update to Rails 5 would be cool.
• Make use of Turbolinks to avoid full page reloads.
• Or even better, replace frontend with React and Redux to outsource more logic (and therefore load) into the client.