rails-wedding

This project contains a rails app I've built to manage RSVP submissions for our wedding. It's designed to provide a lot of automation, and to perform well.

How to Use

If you decide you like the site and would like to use it for your own wedding, you will need to customize a few things:

Configuration

Most of the configuration is stored into environment variables. I'm using the dotenv gem to allow you to provide different values in development than in production.

In Development

To configure the development environment, create a file named .env at the root directory of the application, and enter your values directly in that file.

The full listing of available environment variables is listed below.

In Production

The .env file will be ignored in production. Instead, you should set those variables in the shell for the user that will be running the app in production.

On a Linux or OSX system, use the following syntax in the .profile file in the production user's home directory:

export VAR=value

Note for Capistrano Deployments

I use Capistrano to perform remote deployments to my production server. Because Capistrano calls the assets:precompile task, most of the environment variables used throughout the app must be available to the capistrano process.

To make those variables available, you need to enter them in the following format in a file called .environment in the deployment user's $HOME/.ssh directory:

VAR=value

Environment Variables Listing

# AssetSync configuration
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AWS_KEY
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=AWS_PASSWORD
FOG_DIRECTORY=assets.yourdomain.com
FOG_PROVIDER=AWS
ASSET_SYNC_GZIP_COMPRESSION=true
ASSET_SYNC_MANIFEST=false

# Database Configuration
DATABASE_NAME=wedding_production
DATABASE_USER=POSTGRES_USER
DATABASE_PASSWORD=POSTGRES_PASSWORD

# Sendgrid Credentials for Emails
SENDGRID_USERNAME=username
SENDGRID_PASSWORD=password
SENDGRID_DOMAIN=yourdomain.com
SENDGRID_SERVER=smtp.sendgrid.net
SENDGRID_PORT=587

# Airbrake Exception Notifications
AIRBRAKE_API_KEY=airbrake_key

# ActiveAdmin Configuration
ACTIVEADMIN_SITE_TITLE=Our Wedding

# Email Source for User Management System
[email protected]

# Site Configuration
SITE_NAME=yourdomain.com
SITE_TITLE=X and Y, Month Day, Year
DEFAULT_EMAIL_FOOTER=
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HEADER=
[email protected]

# Google Analytics ID for tracking
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=UA-XXX-X

Features and Design

I've implemented the following features, which will hopefully come in handy for somebody else:

RSVP Management for guests

The submission process allows the visitor to RSVP for an arbitrary number of guests.

I've used the cocoon gem to dynamically add/remove guest forms to the RSVP entry page.

I added validation rules for the guest form fields, and typeahead completion for the dietary restriction fields.

Management Interface

I've set up ActiveAdmin to manage RSVP submission, guests and application users.

I haven't spent too much time configuring the ActiveAdmin dashboards, because out of the box, it provides enough functionality to do everything I needed it to.

Static Content

The static content pages (located at app/views/static) use the same layout as the rest of the app, but are set up to be cached the first time they are generated. The cached pages will be saved in the public directory, which means they will be served directly from the web server without going through rails.

Since public is cleared on capistrano deployments, they will also get swept automatically during each new deployment.

Error Notification

I've added support for the Airbrake gem which will notify their web service when an exception is encountered anywhere in the app.

The service offers free plans, and can email you when an exception is sent.

Twitter Bootstrap styling

I've used the bootstrap-sass-rails gem to cherry-pick selected components from Twitter's Bootstrap UI framework.

I've made extensive use of most of the CSS components provided by the framework, and a fair amount of the JS plugins.

Clean, Semantic Markup

The markup used in the application layout and the static content pages is highly readable free of clutter such as inline styling.

The markup is generated from haml templates, and the CSS stylesheets are built using the SASS indented syntax.

Process Automation

I use the foreman gem to manage the processes the app depends on. I provided the Procfile and Procfile.production files to define what those processes are.

In development mode, simply type foreman start and the app will instantiate a development web server, a background worker to process emails, and the mailcatcher app to catch mail sent by the background worker and display it in your browser.

In production, the deployment system will automatically use foreman's export feature to generate upstart scripts, which is used by most modern Linux distros to manage processes. That script will ensure the app is started at boot-time, along with all its dependencies.

Deployment Automation

The app ships with a capistrano config for deploying to remote hosts. I've configured capistrano to do a few cool things too:

• Precompile assets, and push them to an Amazon S3 bucket
• Update RVM, and update the MRI interpreter if needed
• Creates the app gemset in RVM if needed
• Create a logrotate config on first deployment
• Run bundle install on the target servers
• Export the foreman config into a set of upstart scripts
• Use upstart to restart the web worker and background worker processes

Background Emails

I'm using sidekiq to process emails in the background instead of processing them during the request workflow.

Zero-Downtime Deployments

I'm using the unicorn web server, and I've provided a config file in config/unicorn/production.rb that preloads the app and manages database connections before/after fork to provide rolling restarts.

Email Styling

I use the premailer gem, which allows you to use a stylesheet for your emails, and will then extract the used style definitions and alter the email's markup to include inline styling for the generated emails.

This is unfortunately necessary, since consistent email styling support is hard to accomplish across the board with email clients.

How to Contribute

• Fork the project
• Create a new branch
• Make your changes
• Issue a pull request

TODO

• Provide full test suite
• Use templates for capistrano, nginx and unicorn config recipes
• Provide chef recipes for server provisioning
• Consult the project's issue list for complete list.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.