Welcome to Crystagram!

Hello and welcome to my Phase 5 Project for Flatiron School. We were tasked with using a Ruby on Rails backend and a React frontend to create a functioning full-stack application. I also used postgresql for my database.

This is an instagram clone project that's suited for the heroes of Eorzea and all our lovely Final Fantasy characters! The idea was to create a social app for people who play Final Fantasy XIV and wanted to share screenshots or posts from the perspective of their character.

Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytNplmOWP14

You can view the project at [Pending heroku deploy]

OR

Below are the requirements to run the project on your personal machine, thanks for reading!

Requirements

• Ruby 2.7.4
• NodeJS (v16), and npm
• Postgresql

See Environment Setup below for instructions on installing these tools if you don't already have them.

Setup

Start by forking the project template repository:

$ git fork https://github.com/justinctollison/phase5project

When you're ready to start viewing the project, run:

bundle install
rails db:create
npm install --prefix client

You can use the following commands to run the application:

• rails s: run the backend on http://localhost:3000
• npm start --prefix client: run the frontend on http://localhost:4000
• rails db:migrate: Run the migrations to set up the schema.

Environment Setup

Install the Latest Ruby Version

Verify which version of Ruby you're running by entering this in the terminal:

ruby -v

Make sure that the Ruby version you're running is listed in the supported runtimes by Heroku. At the time of writing, supported versions are 2.6.8, 2.7.4, or 3.0.2. Our recommendation is 2.7.4, but make sure to check the site for the latest supported versions.

If it's not, you can use rvm to install a newer version of Ruby:

rvm install 2.7.4 --default

You should also install the latest versions of bundler and rails:

gem install bundler
gem install rails

Install NodeJS

Verify you are running a recent version of Node with:

node -v

If your Node version is not 16.x.x, install it and set it as the current and default version with:

nvm install 16
nvm use 16
nvm alias default 16

You can also update your npm version with:

npm i -g npm

Install Postgresql

Heroku requires that you use PostgreSQL for your database instead of SQLite. PostgreSQL (or just Postgres for short) is an advanced database management system with more features than SQLite. If you don't already have it installed, you'll need to set it up.

PostgreSQL Installation for WSL

To install Postgres for WSL, run the following commands from your Ubuntu terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Then confirm that Postgres was installed successfully:

psql --version

Run this command to start the Postgres service:

sudo service postgresql start

Finally, you'll also need to create a database user so that you are able to connect to the database from Rails. First, check what your operating system username is:

whoami

If your username is "ian", for example, you'd need to create a Postgres user with that same name. To do so, run this command to open the Postgres CLI:

sudo -u postgres -i

From the Postgres CLI, run this command (replacing "ian" with your username):

createuser -sr ian

Then enter control + d or type logout to exit.

This guide has more info on setting up Postgres on WSL if you get stuck.

Postgresql Installation for OSX

To install Postgres for OSX, you can use Homebrew:

brew install postgresql

Once Postgres has been installed, run this command to start the Postgres service:

brew services start postgresql

Troubleshooting

If you ran into any errors along the way, here are some things you can try to troubleshoot:

• If you're on a Mac and got a server connection error when you tried to run rails db:create, one option for solving this problem for Mac users is to install the Postgres app. To do this, first uninstall postgresql by running brew remove postgresql. Next, download the app from the [Postgres downloads page][postgres downloads page] and install it. Launch the app and click "Initialize" to create a new server. You should now be able to run rails db:create.

• If you're using WSL and got the following error running rails db:create:

  PG::ConnectionBad: FATAL:  role "yourusername" does not exist

  The issue is that you did not create a role in Postgres for the default user account. Check this video for one possible fix.

• If your app failed to deploy at the build stage, make sure your local environment is set up correctly by following the steps at the beginning of this lesson. Check that you have the latest versions of Ruby and Bundler, and ensure that Postgresql was installed successfully.