I created this online ludo game as a way to learn how to write web applications using rails. However, I stopped short of deploying the game online since it was more of a learning experience and I didn't want to deal with various bugs from trying to deploy it on Heroku. However, anyone can pull the code and run the application locally so that they can play with friends! More details on this below.
Here's a view of the what game looks like:
If you are already familiar with rails, this will be super easy. If you are not, you might have to do a little more work to get this to work.
In order to run this app locally (and thus play with friends), you have to first ensure that you have the required binaries:
- Ruby in version 2.7.1 or greater (as long as is backward compatible with version 2.7.1p83). See ruby's website.
- Rails version 6.0.3.x or greater. See rails guide.
- PostgreSQL database.
- I probably had the most trouble here. There's a problem where Postgre seems like it's installed but it's not running. I had to manually delete my running version then install it again.
- Unfortunately I didn't take any note. Hope this is enough to figure it out. You might not run into any bug in fact if you didn't have Postgre previously installed or installed it correctly the first time unlike what I did.
- Node.js. I am not sure if rails installs it automatically, but if it doesn't, you should make sure node.js works. This also comes with yarn package manager and a few other packages.
I believe thsoe are all the requirements. After installing them, you can
simply git clone this repo, then run bundle install to install
everything, and then run locally. To run it, run with the following command:
bin/rails server -b 0.0.0.0 -p 3000This will bind the IP 0.0.0.0, which allows people on the same network
to access your application. To be honest, I don't fully understand how
this binding thing works, but the above is what helped make it work.
Here are some resources on that if curious:
To be able to run it online with friends not necessarily on
the same network, ngrok was a solution that worked
relatively well for me. Still, rails requires that you specify the host
that you're deploying from. Let's assume you're running on port 3000
(and this app runs on 3000 anyway). After you've downloaded and
installed ngrok, you run the following on your terminal:
ngrok http 3000Then, it will output something like this on that window:
Note how it has a URL that forwards to http://localhost:3000 that matches
the following regex: https?://.+\.ngrok.io. Take that url, open
config/application.rb, and add the line:
config.hosts << URL(where URL is the url from ngrok)
I preferred adding this everytime I made a new game because it's more secure than just allowing any ngrok url forward to my localhost at port 3000.
This app was initially generated using rails new with Ruby version 2.7.1p83
and Rails version 6.0.3.
The Wiki contains a bit more detailed informations on the game design and other things.
I would greatly appreciate any contribution. Feel free to make pull requests and such.