Ruby on Rails web app to manage students, enterprises and internships.
A few DFHI/ISFATES BBA and CS students decided to accomplish the following task: Analyze every “business process” inside the institute and its partner universities that involves a contact between the university and enterprises:
E.g.:
- enterprise sends offer: how is it transmitted to the students?
- student has found internship: how can a study program director authorize and validate an internship?
In January 2014, a group of 6 students created a prototype in vanilla PHP, based on MVC. A large part of the time went into the (relational) data model design and refinement.
During my Bachelor internship, I worked with Oracle Application Express (Apex). I used my acquired experience in Apex to rebuild the app with Oracle technologies (including PL/SQL). The project did not go into production, since it was still a prototype and difficult to host, especially with Oracle’s licensing policy.
I was curious to learn new technologies, so I decided to learn Ruby on Rails. As a test project, I wanted to rebuild the app, this time with Open Source technologies.
I worked on the app between:
- November 2014 - December 2014
- March 2015 - April 2015
- October 2016 - January 2017 (see below)
- March 2017 - April 2017 (SPA, see below)
- May 2017 - July 2017
- March 2019
After having finished my studies, I worked for the university on an existing alumni app, built with Apache Tapestry (Java framework). I removed duplicate parts from my RoR app (e.g. edit and delete students) and adjusted it to the Tapestry web app data model. It was a very interesting experience to build an app on an existing “legacy” database.
Moreover, I discovered that the university’s alumni organisation also created an app to manage students and offers, so I removed the offer functionality from my app.
I wanted to try out Vue.js, so I created REST / JSON routes in the existing RoR app and built a SPA Front end with Vue.js.
I decided to revert the changes made in October 2016, and publish the app on GitHub, under a new name: University management system.
Install ruby version 2.3, and PostgreSQL version 9.6. (Rails also works with MySQL.)
Configure your database (credentials) in the file config/database.yml.
Next, make sure, the bundle command works, and that you are in the project's root.
Then, execute bundle install, which will install the dependencies.
Then, you have to create the database tables with rake db:migrate.
You can also insert test data with rake db:seed.
You need a secret key for verifying the integrity of signed cookies.
Execute rake secret to generate the key. Copy the displayed key and create an environment variable SECRET_KEY_BASE with it.
You could also insert it in config/secrets.yml.
Open config/environments/{development,production}.rb and edit the config.action_mailer.smtp_settings and the config.action_mailer.default_url_options settings to configure your mailer.
Finally, execute rails server -p 3000 to start the application in development mode.
Add -e production to start the application in production mode.
You can then open the application under localhost:3000.
If you know how to use Docker and have Docker and Docker Compose installed, you can follow the following instructions.
Go to path/to/project/ and run docker-compose build, with --no-cache option if needed.
In order to run the Rails app and the database, run docker-compose run.
You can get a list of all the containers with docker ps -a.
This list also contains the ID of each container.
On Ubuntu, I ran docker inspect <CONTAINER_ID> to get the IP address of the Rails app container to access the server.
In order to run a command in a container (web or db), use docker-compose run --rm (web|db) your_command.
your_command could be rake db:create db:migrate or bash.
You need to create (= migrate) the tables. Do it with:
bin/rails db:migrate RAILS_ENV=development
Seed the tables (e.g. insert countries) with:
bin/rails db:seed RAILS_ENV=development
Create the test database by adding RAILS_ENV=test at the end.
Run the tests with the command ... bundle exec cucumber.
Open a Rails console for the test environment with ... rails console test