dotenv VS Chart.js

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv

ChartsJS for inspiring me with the pie chart.

Most of frontend libraries are made with Vanilla JS. An example of library that you might frequently use is "Chart.js". But React is not compatible with Chart.js so here it comes "React-chartjs-2" A wrapper library to work with Chart.js in React ecosystem. Oh you want to use "three.js" for some cool 3D? you will need "React-three/fiber". In my case, I need to implement "telegram-web-app", not so fast, I have to create my own wrapper to be able to use it.

Chart.js

Chart.js is a free, open-source JavaScript library for data visualization, which supports eight chart types: bar, line, area, pie, bubble, radar, polar and scatter. It's licensed under the permissive MIT license and is renowned for being flexible, lightweight, easy to use and extendible.

They are images so it could be any number of things, datawrapper, charts.js, d3.js to name a few options.

Charts.js for creating diagrams

Connie Leung wrote a tutorial to demonstrate how these new hooks work, integrating an Angular app with the Chart.js library: "DOM reading and writing with new lifecycle hooks in Angular"

Thanks to all who participated in our 2023 Self-Host User Survey! Below is a link to the results, which we've visualized using Chart.js.

Chart.js