dgmora / menu

Menu

This Rails app displays receipes stored in Contentful. You can see a quick demo here

Running it

Building

Docker is the only requirement. This command will build the docker image, install the gems and setup the database

echo "<masterkey>" > config/master.key
make init

Alternatively, you can install Ruby 2.7.1, Postgresql, bundler, which should be:

# install rvm
rvm install 2.7.1
rvm use 2.7.1
gem install bundler
bundle install
bundle exec rake db:create db:schema:load db:migrate

Starting it locally

This will just start the server with the database using docker-compose

make server

Visit http://localhost:3000

Running the tests

make test

or

make guard

Decisions and observations

Just some thoughts on why I built it this way.

Initial decisions

I wanted to use what was already there, since I have no experience with Contentful and what they have already built is going to be more robust and with more features than my ApiClient™. ActiveResource is something else I thought about, but I thought it was going to be too much customization. I think it could be a good solution though, since objects might behave more like ActiveRecord objects.

I don't think having a database where to store the recipes locally would bring a lot. It defeats the purpose of having Contentful, and while it's nice to have a 'local' storage, the complexity grows a lot.

Testing

Then the other thing to consider was testing. Not having a database makes testing a bit more annoying, since either you need to have VCR and make http calls (which I tend to avoid when possible) or mock the http calls. (You don't have anything behind when you do Recipe.all)

I tried to use ContentfulModel and do Recipe.new() to build the test objects, but that actually throws errors. This turned out to be a quite big inconvenient, because testing model methods gets very hard. I also tried to use FactoryBot with OpenStruct, so build(:recipe) returns an OpenStruct. That worked, but I would still have to mock relatively a lot, and using this technique with complex objects ends up in tests that are not so good.

So I went for VCR and recorded some of the tests. Most of the tests are the ones generated by rails, since I mostly used other libraries' code.

Other

The whole docker setup was not necessary, but I have a sort of template for that, and I think it's nice and quick.

I used some helpers to have part of the code out of the views and so it's easier to test. I did not want to complicate myself with adding a decorator gem or similar.

I think it's possible in the Contentful gems to enable caching, but I did not dig further.

ContentfulModel also has support for paging, which could also be added.

I had a few more commits but I had to remove them to filter the organization id from the VCR cassettes.