This repo contains a simple (and incomplete) Ruby on Rails application. For your assessment, you will be updating and implementing functionality within this application. This is an app that will allow users to send sms messages by submitting data into a web form.
You will need a GitHub account if you don't already have one: https://github.com/join?source=header-home. Once that is done, view this readme on our GitHub page at: https://github.com/nw0428/si-dev-assessment. and click on the 'Fork' button in the upper right corner. This will create a copy of the repo under your account.
Next you will need to install ruby and rails on your computer. This is most easily done by following the instructions here: http://installrails.com/ Make sure to install ruby version 2.3.0
Then download your version of this project from github. You can do this either by git clone(ing) from your fork or by using the link that allows you to download it as a zip file
In the terminal window, first run the command
bundle install
to install the necessary libraries, including the Rails framework and the PostgreSQL Ruby library. Next, run the command
sudo service postgresql start
to start the PostgreSQL database service. Finally, run the command
rake db:setup
to create the necessary databases for this application.
At this point, you should be able to run your webapp! Run rails s and you should see the following
Your code is running at localhost:3000
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 5.0.0 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:8080
=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options
Puma starting in single mode...
* Version 3.6.0 (ruby 2.3.0-p0), codename: Sleepy Sunday Serenity
* Min threads: 5, max threads: 5
* Environment: development
* Listening on tcp://0.0.0.0:8080
Use Ctrl-C to stop
When first viewing your application (either in a browser or in the preview mode in the IDE), you will see a page that simply says
Pages#home
Find me in app/views/pages/home.html.erb
which is not the most welcoming of homepages. Your first task is to update this page. Give this page a heading and add a welcome message. Then update the form on this page to include inputs where your user can type in a message and a number to send it to. You'll probably need a submit button as well. For this task, you can update the view entirely in html or use the rails form helpers (see http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html)
Extra:
Styling this page is important not only for aesthetic reasons, but for usability reasons as well. Go to town! The easiest place to add your styles is in the application.css file.
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes. In your bash window in the IDE you can run:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 1"
to commit your changes locally and then
git push origin
to push up your local commits to your GitHub account.
If you are very new to Git, you can check out this resource: http://readwrite.com/2013/09/30/understanding-github-a-journey-for-beginners-part-1/
Upon submitting your form, you will see an error being thrown. The error message will mention that the sms action of the PagesController is not yet implemented. Find where this error is being raised and remove it. Now you will know where the form submission is processed.
Extra:
It may be helpful at this point to see what data is submitted in the form submission. This application includes the byebug gem for this purpose. We can use this by adding the
byebug
statement to set a breakpoint. This sets up a point to interact with the code in the terminal window where you have the server running (where you ran rails s). When the code execution reaches this point, an interactive debugging session is opened. Check this for yourself by adding the byebug command in the form action and resubmitting the form. Take a look here for more information on how to use byebug: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/debugging_rails_applications.html#debugging-with-the-byebug-gem. In particular, inspect what is passed in as params to this action; in the interactive debugging session, just type params to have the debugger print out the value stored in that variable: do you see your form input? Before going on, you'll want to remove the breakpoint.
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 2"
Now when you submit the form, after the submission is processed in the controller, you'll find that the app takes you to a different page. This page should be a submission confirmation page, so update it confirming that the submission worked.
Extra: It may be more helpful to let the user know exactly what was processed, you may want to display to the user what message they sent, and to which number.
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 3"
While our app now can successfully post a form submission and return a success page, the actual processing of the form submission doesn't do anything yet. We're going to want to update that to read the submitted data and pass this to an api library from Twilio to send the message. The first step is to install the Twilio Ruby library, which you can read about here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries/ruby
One way to install the library locally is to simply run
gem install twilio-ruby
However, this will need to be done every time this application is pulled down. A better way is to list this library in the list of required gems for the application, so that it and all of its dependencies get included in the installation when you run
bundle install
To complete this task, make sure twilio-ruby is added to the required gems. After installing the gem, you will need to restart your server before you can use it.
For further reading into this, first take a look at the contents of the Gemfile file, and see this article on StackOverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14072880/whats-the-use-of-gemfile-in-rails
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 4"
To use the Twilio library, you will need a Twilio account. You can create a free trial account here: https://www.twilio.com/try-twilio As part of creating your account, you will provide a personal phone number which will be verified, and then you will get a Twilio phone number which is the number from which your application will be able to send messages. Your trial account will only let you send messages to verified phone numbers, which is true of your personal phone number. If you want to send messages to another number, you'll have to verify it first.
We're now ready to process the form submission you created in Task 1 by sending its data to our api library and having it generate the sms message. Take a look at the example code listed on the library page for the syntax of interacting with the library: https://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries/ruby Based on that example, you should be able to substitute in the data you receive from the form submission to use the appropriate message body and to field.
Extra:
While the example code will work, it's a poor practice to include authentication information like your account ID and auth token in your code. A better practice is to set these values as environment variables and have your application read them from the environment. This will make your application more portable and more secure. Read more about this here:
http://railsapps.github.io/rails-environment-variables.html
Update the code to read the Account Id, Auth Token, and From Phone Number from environment variables, which you can set as Unix environment variables (e.g. export TWILIO_ACCOUNT_ID=...)
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 6"
At this point you should have a working app that allows you to send and sms message to your personal phone number and any other number you've verified with your Twilio account. Congratulations! We can't wait to take a look at the work you've done so far.
Be sure to push your latest code up to your GitHub repo:
git push origin
While it's nice to see your source code, what we'd really like is to see your app running on a server. Heroku makes this easy to do. First test if you have the Heroku CLI installed by running
heroku version.
If you get an error, go to
https://toolbelt.heroku.com/
and install it. Now create yourself a Heroku account, if you don't already have one:
https://signup.heroku.com/login.
Now you can create an app on your Heroku account with heroku create and then deploy via git push heroku master. When that completes, you should see a message remote: https://{your Heroku app name}.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku and you will be able to see your deployed app at https://{your Heroku app name}.herokuapp.com/.
More information on deploying your app to Heroku can be found here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-rails5.
To submit, make sure your latest changes are pushed both to GitHub and Heroku, and send us a link to your repo and to the deployed app.