Superlocal

Superlocal is a reddit-style message board system that allows you to turn your address into a message board. It was envisioned as a digital corkboard for apartment buildings as an easy way to broadcast building-wide notices, offer and seek ride-sharing opportunities, or just to complain about the asshole in #B10.

Dependencies

Superlocal was developed on Ruby v2.0 and Rails v4.0. Several gems were utilized to make development easier:

gem 'figaro'
gem 'devise'
gem 'ancestry'
gem 'thumbs_up'
gem 'acts_as_follower'
gem 'draper'

Additionally, the app uses the USPS Webtools API to standardize postal addresses to prevent duplicate message boards.

Installation

1. Clone the repository.

2. Create a /config/application.yml file with environmental variables holding all your secret keys (see figaro's documentation for more details) and add it to your .gitignore file.

   RAILS_SECRET_KEY_BASE: '<rails secret key>'
   NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY: '<newrelic license key>'
   DEVISE_SECRET_KEY:     '<devise secret key>'
   USPS_API_USERNAME:     '<usps api username>'
   USPS_API_PASSWORD:     '<usps api password>'
   SENDGRID_USERNAME:     '<sendgrid username>'
   SENDGRID_PASSWORD:     '<sendgrid password>'

3. If deploying to Heroku, add these environmental variables to your production environment: $ heroku config:set RAILS_SECRET_KEY_BASE=1234abcd

4. If deploying to Heroku, pick an email provider. Sendgrid is easy: $ heroku addons:add sendgrid:starter

5. Copy the new sendgrid configuration variables to your /config/application.yml file.

6. Add the following to your config/environment.rb file:

   ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
     :address        => 'smtp.sendgrid.net',
     :port           => '587',
     :authentication => :plain,
     :user_name      => ENV['SENDGRID_USERNAME'],
     :password       => ENV['SENDGRID_PASSWORD'],
     :domain         => 'heroku.com',
     :enable_starttls_auto => true
   }

7. As of v3.1.0, Devise requires the secret key be available during asset precompilation. Heroku's Cedar stack doesn't support this by default, but you can enable it using the $ heroku labs:enable user-env-compile -a <appname> command.

TODO

• Board admins
• Submitted links are currently not displayed
• Sorting algorithms (currently sorts by most recent)
• Private messaging

Credits

Superlocal is the product of Ryan Ringler. It was developed largerly as a pet project to continue to learn and better understand rails.

License

Superlocal is licensed under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for additional details.