Retweet: A Twitter Application Template

A base application template for building simple Twitter web apps with Sinatra and DataMapper. If you just want to build a simple keyword-based aggregator (such as tweetdreams.org), all you need to do is edit environment.rb to set the name of your app and the API search keyword(s), edit the CSS, and go.

Configuration

Dependencies and all configuration is done in environment.rb. Your database is also set up here. DataMapper will use sqlite3 by default. Tests use the sqlite3-memory adapter (no configuration needed).

Add your controller actions in application.rb. Views for these actions are placed in the views directory. Static files, including a stock stylesheet, go in the public directory. Models go in the lib directory and are auto-loaded.

Testing

Rspec is included in the template. Add your specs in spec; just require spec_helper.rb to pre-configure the test environment. To run the specs:

  rake spec

Getting Started

  rake db:migrate
  rake twitter:update
  ruby application.rb

Status Updates

Run rake twitter:update to update the cached tweets. You can schedule this as a cron job to fire every few minutes if you like.