Chitter Challenge

This is the project for week 4 of the Makers bootcamp. It uses Ruby, Sinatra, PostgreSQL and Mailgun.

A production version is available to use at https://chitter-gap8.onrender.com

All RSpec tests are passing, and simplecov is reporting 97% test coverage.

There's some very basic @mention functionality which will send a notification to the tagged user. See Notes below for more on this.

Deploying

I've deployed this on Render, but it should deploy anywhere that supports Ruby and Postgres (and Mailgun if you use the email notifications).

1. Clone the repo.
2. Create a Postgres database using spec/table_schemas.sql.
3. If you're testing it locally, you'll need to populate the database with spec/seeds.sql to make sure the RSpec tests continue to pass.
4. Set these environment variables:

• ENV['DATABASE_URL'] should be set the the URL of your Postgres host.
• If using the email notification functionality, you'll need to set:
  • ENV["MAILGUN_API_KEY"] is your Mailgun API key.
  • ENV["CHITTER_FROM"] is the address that Chitter will send notifications from.
  • ENV["CHITTER_SENDING_DOMAIN"] is your Mailgun sending domain.

Notes

• In this version, if you @mention another user, it will send a notification to their registered email address. This currently only works:
  • If @name is at the start of the Peep.
  • If the user has registered with a single name. If they registered with their full name, it won't work. To help with this, I need to add a separate username field to the database (it's currently just using name, email address and a unique user ID that isn't accessible to the user).
  • If the capitalisation is exactly the same as the name the user registered with.

Todo

• Add a username field.
• Make the @mention parsing more robust.
• Implement threaded replies (will probably need to add a join table between Peeps and their replies for this).
• Add more robust input validation and sanisation.