Vpeeker Channels

This is the code that originally powered Vinepeek Channels. It is a subscription service that allows customers to create their own 'channels' of Vines a la Vinepeek.

As part of our sunsetting policy, we are open-sourcing the code for the community to use and improve upon if anyone wishes to.

This code, while complete, is rough around the edges as it is more or less a direct open-sourcing of a private project. As a result, some quirks may remain and the code may not be strictly portable from the environment it was run in.

High level overview

• Channels are owned by users, who are tied to a Twitter account. Channels have some basic configuration tied to them, most importantly the 'filter' which filters videos to only the ones the user wants on their channel.
• Channels are populated with Videos which are fetched via the Twitter Search API at regular intervals (the interval is dynamic based on the activity of the filter).
• Videos are displayed to users of the channel in a semi-random way, ensuring they mostly view recent videos.
• What a user can and cannot do is controlled by what Plan they are on. Plans are customised by admins.

Requirements

Vpeeker Channels requires the following elements:

• Ruby 1.9.3.
• Rails 3.2.
• PostgreSQL
• The ability to handle long-running processes (The default is to spawn from Unicorn).
• A Fastspring account for payments & subscriptions.
• Some Twitter application credentials.

It has been tested and deployed on Heroku, and should run there with minimum fuss.

Installation notes

• Vpeeker Channels was built to be run on a subdomain. If this isn't the case, make sure to change config.action_dispatch.tld_length back to 1 in config/environemnts/production.rb.
• The first user to sign in will be an admin.

Configuration

Configuration is done through environment variables. References to these variables and their use are in config/config.yml.

Fastspring

Fastspring is used for payment processing. You must set up custom HTTP callback notifications within Fastspring. Documentation for these still needs to be written, for now look at subscriptions_controller.rb and work out what fields are used.