Here I'll add some comments along making this small TODO API-only app. I use RubyMine from JetBrains as IDE, and Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS as dev environment.
Versioning of APIs is skipped for simplicity.
Start a new API-only Rails 5.0 project:
rails new todo_app --api
Add few gems to Gemfile:
gem 'rspec-rails' # for testing with RSpec - TODO
gem 'bcrypt' # password hashing
gem 'active_model_serializers' # model serializer
gem 'rack-cors' # cross domain access
I decided to go for a version with authentication, but
without categories handling. This means I will have two
models - User and Task.
User model I made without email field for simplicity.
Authentication will be handled via token field assigned ONLY
once randomly to each user during the creation of the user and stored
in the database. Better practice would be to generate this token
each time the user logs in, and remove it on logout + add expiration time.
Here I made a simple implementation by myself, but one can use
already made libraries like Knock, Diverse, Authlogic and others for
JWT based authentication. Probably a smart idea would be to cache the
token in the Redis so that server will not call database on
each request checking if token is correct and/or to which user
it is assigned.
rails generate scaffold User username:string password:digest token:string
rails generate migration add_index_to_users_token
Task model is simple with just few fields and reference to User model.
rails generate scaffold Task title:string done:boolean user:references
Create user:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"user": {"username": USERNAME,"password": PASSWORD } } ' "http://localhost:3000/users/"
Login user:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"user": {"username": USERNAME,"password": PASSWORD } } ' "http://localhost:3000/login"
Get all users:
curl -H "Authorization: Token token=TOKEN" http://localhost:3000/users
Deployed to Heroku:
https://guarded-peak-24627.herokuapp.com
Still TODO (ironically), just for fun:
- testing with RSpec
- use fixtures for unit testing
- refactor unit tests for controllers
- make a simple client in VueJS
- implement categories