Link Board - Part 1

We are going to create a clone of Hacker News. Hacker news is a reddit-style link board that allows users to post links which are upvoted by other users so the best links rise to the top.

For part 1, we're going focus on Users and Posts only. The goal for is to create an app that allows users to sign up, login, and add posts. In part 2, we'll work on adding additional components.

Getting Started

• Fork and clone this repo
• Create a Rails app

Requirements

Suggested Models

User

• email
• password_digest
• name

Post

• title
• link
• user (created using user:references)

Suggested Routes

Auth

Verb	Route	Action	Purpose
GET	/signup	users#new	render user sign up form
POST	/signup	users#create	create user in database (signup)
GET	/login	sessions#new	render user log in form
POST	/login	sessions#create	create user session (login)
DELETE	/logout	sessions#destroy	destroy user session (logout)

Post

Create basic CRUD routes (see RESTful routing table if needed). Rails can do this for you using resources in routes.rb.

Verb	Route	Action	Purpose
GET	/	posts#index	render list of all posts
GET	/posts/new	posts#new	render add post form
POST	/posts	posts#create	create post in database (associated to logged in user)

Note: We're using the root for posts#index because (just like hacker news) we want to list all posts on the home page.

Suggested Validations

• post.title
  • required
  • should be between 10 and 100 chars
• post.link
  • required
  • should be a valid url
• user.email
  • required
  • valid email
  • unique
• user.name
  • required
  • less than 20 chars

Suggested Development Process

Setup basic Rails app / repo

• Fork and clone this repo
• create a new Rails app rails new ./ -T -d postgresql
• create your database rake db:create
• test rails s go to localhost:3000 in browser

Setup user / authentication

• Create User model
• add has_secure_password and validations
• enable bcrypt gem in Gemfile
• migrate rake db:migrate
• test using rails c (User.all, User.create, etc)
• Test validations by violating them and adjust if needed
• Create authentication routes / controller / actions / views
• Test that you can signup and log in / out

Setup posts

• Create Post model
• add validations
• add associations
• migrate rake db:migrate
• test rails c (Post.all, Post.create, etc)
  • Test validations (by violating them)
  • Test associations (by adding a post owned by a user)
  • Adjust as needed
• Create crud routes / views / actions for Post

Testing Models

After creating your models it's generally a good idea to test them out to make sure they're working as expected (before creating controllers / views)

Testing User Model

User.all
#should give us an empty array

User.create(email: 'blah@blah.com', name: 'a name', password: 'qwertyuiop')
#should create a user

User.all
#should list our newly created user - password should be hashed

Testing valdations

User.create 
#no parameters should fail validation

User.create email: 'blah@blah.com', name: 'a name', password: 'qwertyuiop'
#duplicate e-mail should fail

Testing Associations

User.last
#returns the last user we created

User.last.posts
#empty array

User.last.posts.create(title:'my post title', link:'http://www.google.com')
#should create a post associated with a user

Post.last
#should list our newly created post

User.last.posts
#should show our newly created post (that belongs to the user)

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Licensing

1. All content is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
2. All software code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. For commercial use or alternative licensing, please contact legal@ga.co.