CocoaHeads Atlanta Web Site

Welcome to the CocoaHeads Atlanta web site project. The site is based on Ruby on Rails version 4.0.0.

This is a ground up rebuild of the current cocoaheadsatlanta.org site.

The project is available on Pivotal Tracker so please request to join if interested in helping: Project.

I. Developer Platform Dependencies

Like most projects there have been some dependency choices made for convenience and familarity. However, if you have issue with any of the choices please don't hesitate to suggest alternatives.

For example I chose to use RSpec as the testing framework, Guard to report spec pass/fail status, terminal-notifier-guard for nifty OS X Notification Center integration, and Factory Girl for fixture replacement.

Notice: A few of these choices are OS X 10.8 specific. So if this causes any issues for anyone please either add the platform specific condtional loading to the Gemfile or post a bug to the Pivotal Tracker Project and I'll add that. I am currently running under the assumption that everyone interested in contributing is already running a Mac with 10.8 installed.

II. Getting Started

1. Protecting Secrets

This site relies on account authentication through external services via OAuth or OpenID. It currently has no facility for local username/password style logins. In order to protect the secret authentication credentials the CUSTOMER_KEY and CUSTOMER_SECRET for each OAuth provider is never committed directly to the repository.

You can find an example configuration file in...

./config/examples/application.yml

Begin by copying the configuration file (starting from the root of the project wrapper folder) from the example folder to the standard config folder as shown below:

cp ./config/examples/application.yml ./config/

Also copy the example database.yml from examples to the config folder. The datebase.yml file is not version controlled for similar reasons, both to protect the production database settings, and to allow developers to have some flexibility in choosing a development database.

Again, from the root of the project run:

cp ./config/examples/database.yml ./config/

2. Install Gem Dependencies

bundle install

3. Setup Development Database

Create your development database. I use SQLite for development. You are free to use whatever database you choose. Just make sure all code is compatilbe with SQLite, so no database specific SQL please.

rake db:migrate

III. Ignoring Operating System and Text Editor Temporary Files

Please be sure to create a global .gitignore file to prevent commiting files used by OS X, or your chosen text editor.

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Here is what my global ignore file contains as an example:

.DS_Store
*~
.*~
*~.*
*.o
*.lo
*.la
.*.rej
*.rej

IV. Automated Testing

1. RSpec

It is highly recommended that RSpec specs are provided with all pull requests to be considered for inclusion into the official project source code.

2. Factory Girl

The project uses Factory Girl for fixture replacement so please take some time to familiarize yourself with that if necessary.