This repo contains a simple (and incomplete) Ruby on Rails application. For your assessment, you will be updating and implementing functionality within this application. This is an app that will allow users to send sms messages by submitting data into a web form.
Setting up your development environment has historically been a process fraught with odd installation errors and system quirks. In order to get you up and coding as quickly as possible, and in order to allow you to share your work as easily as possible, we encourage you to use a hosted development environment from Cloud 9 (http://c9.io). This means you will have your own workspace in the cloud which will handle the annoying bits of installing Ruby, the Rails framework, Git, and PostgreSQL for you, and in a consistent way across different system and operating system configurations.
You will need a GitHub account if you don't already have one: https://github.com/join?source=header-home. Once that is done, view this readme on our GitHub page at: https://github.com/StartupInstitute/si-dev-assessment. and click on the 'Fork' button in the upper right corner. This will create a copy of the repo under your account.
Next, you will need to sign up for a Cloud 9 account if you don't already have one: https://c9.io/signup After you create your account, you will need to connect your Cloud 9 account to your Github account in order to pull the source code into a new workspace you will set up. Go to your Connected Services page in your Cloud 9 settings: https://c9.io/account/services and connect your GitHub account by entering your login credentials.
At this point, you will be able to set up a new workspace pulling in the code contained in your Git repo. Go to your repo listing:
https://c9.io/account/repos
where you should see your forked repo called si-dev-assessment. Click on the Clone to Edit button which will take you to a new page to create a new workspace. Enter in a name (something like {yourName}-si-dev-assessment) and description for your application, and make note of the Clone from Git or Mecurial URL value; it should be something like git@github.com:{yourGitUsername}/si-dev-assessment.git. In the "Choose a template" section, you will want to select Ruby. The click Create workspace to create your environment, which might take a few minutes.
Upon the creation of your new workspace, you will be taken to an in-browser IDE that will contain a file browser on the left, a code editor in the center, and a terminal window at the bottom. In the terminal window, first run the command
bundle install
to install the necessary libraries, including the Rails framework and the PostgreSQL Ruby library. Next, run the command
sudo service postgresql start
to start the PostgreSQL database service. Finally, run the command
rake db:setup
to create the necessary databases for this application.
At this point, you should be able to run your webapp! Click on the Run Project button at the top center of the window. You should see in the console output something like
Your code is running at https://{yourAppName}-{yourC9username}.c9users.io.
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 5.0.0 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:8080
=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options
Puma starting in single mode...
* Version 3.6.0 (ruby 2.3.0-p0), codename: Sleepy Sunday Serenity
* Min threads: 5, max threads: 5
* Environment: development
* Listening on tcp://0.0.0.0:8080
Use Ctrl-C to stop
Note the url in the first line. This is a public URL and you will be able to view your application in a browser at this URL whenever your project is running. You can also click on the Preview button at the top center to view the application in an embedded browser within your IDE.
Before going further, you may want to take a tour of some of the features that the Cloud 9 IDE offers you by clicking on the glowing grey dots scattered throughout the IDE (for example, near the 'Preview', 'Run Project', and 'Stop' buttons). And now with the setup complete, you can now get started coding yourself!
When first viewing your application (either in a browser or in the preview mode in the IDE), you will see a page that simply says
Pages#home
Find me in app/views/pages/home.html.erb
which is not the most welcoming of homepages. Your first task is to update this page. Give this page a heading and add a welcome message. Then update the form on this page to include inputs where your user can type in a message and a number to send it to. You'll probably need a submit button as well. For this task, you can update the view entirely in html or use the rails form helpers (see http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html)
Extra:
Styling this page is important not only for aesthetic reasons, but for usability reasons as well. Go to town! The easiest place to add your styles is in the application.css file.
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes. In your bash window in the IDE you can run:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 1"
to commit your changes locally and then
git push origin
to push up your local commits to your GitHub account.
If you are very new to Git, you can check out this resource: http://readwrite.com/2013/09/30/understanding-github-a-journey-for-beginners-part-1/
Upon submitting your form, you will see an error being thrown. The error message will mention that the sms action of the PagesController is not yet implemented. Find where this error is being raised and remove it. Now you will know where the form submission is processed.
Extra:
It may be helpful at this point to see what data is submitted in the form submission. This application includes the byebug gem for this purpose. We can use this by adding the
byebug
statement to set a breakpoint. This sets up a point to interact with the code in the terminal window where you have the server running (where you ran rails s). When the code execution reaches this point, an interactive debugging session is opened. Check this for yourself by adding the byebug command in the form action and resubmitting the form. Take a look here for more information on how to use byebug: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/debugging_rails_applications.html#debugging-with-the-byebug-gem. In particular, inspect what is passed in as params to this action; in the interactive debugging session, just type params to have the debugger print out the value stored in that variable: do you see your form input? Before going on, you'll want to remove the breakpoint.
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 2"
Now when you submit the form, after the submission is processed in the controller, you'll find that the app takes you to a different page. This page should be a submission confirmation page, so update it confirming that the submission worked.
Extra: It may be more helpful to let the user know exactly what was processed, you may want to display to the user what message they sent, and to which number.
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 3"
While our app now can successfully post a form submission and return a success page, the actual processing of the form submission doesn't do anything yet. We're going to want to update that to read the submitted data and pass this to an api library from Twilio to send the message. The first step is to install the Twilio Ruby library, which you can read about here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries/ruby
One way to install the library locally is to simply run
gem install twilio-ruby
However, this will need to be done every time this application is pulled down. A better way is to list this library in the list of required gems for the application, so that it and all of its dependencies get included in the installation when you run
bundle install
To complete this task, make sure twilio-ruby is added to the required gems. After installing the gem, you will need to restart your server (in the Cloud 9 IDE, 'Stop' the server and then 'Run Project' again) before you can use it.
For further reading into this, first take a look at the contents of the Gemfile file, and see this article on StackOverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14072880/whats-the-use-of-gemfile-in-rails
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 4"
To use the Twilio library, you will need a Twilio account. You can create a free trial account here: https://www.twilio.com/try-twilio As part of creating your account, you will provide a personal phone number which will be verified, and then you will get a Twilio phone number which is the number from which your application will be able to send messages. Your trial account will only let you send messages to verified phone numbers, which is true of your personal phone number. If you want to send messages to another number, you'll have to verify it first.
We're now ready to process the form submission you created in Task 1 by sending its data to our api library and having it generate the sms message. Take a look at the example code listed on the library page for the syntax of interacting with the library: https://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries/ruby Based on that example, you should be able to substitute in the data you receive from the form submission to use the appropriate message body and to field.
Extra:
While the example code will work, it's a poor practice to include authentication information like your account ID and auth token in your code. A better practice is to set these values as environment variables and have your application read them from the environment. This will make your application more portable and more secure. Read more about this here:
http://railsapps.github.io/rails-environment-variables.html
Update the code to read the Account Id, Auth Token, and From Phone Number from environment variables, which you can set as Unix environment variables (e.g. export TWILIO_ACCOUNT_ID=...)
Before going on, be sure to commit your changes:
git commit -a -m "Finishing Task 6"
At this point you should have a working app that allows you to send and sms message to your personal phone number and any other number you've verified with your Twilio account. Congratulations! We can't wait to take a look at the work you've done so far.
Be sure to push your latest code up to your GitHub repo:
git push origin
While it's nice to see your source code, what we'd really like is to see your app running on a server. If you've been using Cloud 9, you'll already be able to see your application in a browser by going to the app url when you have your project running. But this is really only intended for running your application in development mode, and is not how to deploy your application in a production environment. Luckily, there is another service, Heroku, that makes this easy to do. First test if you have the Heroku CLI installed by running
heroku version.
If you get an error, go to
https://toolbelt.heroku.com/
and install it. If you're using Cloud 9, you should already have this installed. Now create yourself a Heroku account, if you don't already have one:
https://signup.heroku.com/login.
Now you can create an app on your Heroku account with heroku create and then deploy via git push heroku master. When that completes, you should see a message remote: https://{your Heroku app name}.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku and you will be able to see your deployed app at https://{your Heroku app name}.herokuapp.com/.
More information on deploying your app to Heroku can be found here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-rails5.
To submit, make sure your latest changes are pushed both to GitHub and Heroku, and send us a link to your repo and to the deployed app.