Book Image

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

By : Chang Sau Sheong
Book Image

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

By: Chang Sau Sheong

Overview of this book

Most users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don’t fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet's most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book’s main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Deploying the clone


As in the previous chapter, we will deploy to the local machine (your desktop or laptop) and then to Heroku. The steps are quite similar except for one or two minor differences.

Deploying locally

For development purposes we would normally run it off the command line using the built-in web server. However, before we do this, we need to set up the database. Let's assume that for this application we have installed MySQL. At the command line go into the MySQL interactive command console:

$ mysql –u <username> -p <password>

Then just do a simple:

mysql> create database tweetclone;

This will just create the database. Next, go into IRB and run the following command:

> require 'models'

This will require the necessary classes for creating the database tables. Next, just run the following command:

> DataMapper.auto_migrate!

This will create the tables for the application. To run the application, we just need to run this at the command line:

$ ruby tweetclone...