dotenv VS Font-Awesome

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

the i element is the icon of the button, I'm using fontawesome.com for the icon, the class fa-apple retrives Apple icon for us.

Icons: Fontawesome Development: HTML, SCSS, JavaScript Deployment: Github + Netlify

1. Font Awesome

For generic icons (i.e. you just need a d6 and not a system-specific d6 option), Foundry has Font Awesome which are easy to search, then copy and insert, and always look good inline.

The following is an example of defining Font Awesome:

Of course, we have many different ways of solving this problem. Some of the most common include pre-existing third-party icon libraries (such as Font Awesome), icons bundled into a third-party component library (like the Kendo UI Icons), or a completely custom set of icons designed and maintained by your design team. Obviously, going 100% custom will require more work (on both the design and dev side), but might be worth it to achieve a truly unique look – or if the UI will require icons for uncommon symbols or concepts.

The featured GitHub projects are dynamically retrieved through the power of the GitHub GraphQL API. The blog posts are seamlessly pulled in using the Dev.to API. Additionally, Redis is used to cache the GitHub and Dev.to API responses for 1 hour to reduce the number of API calls. Icons are provided by Font Awesome through their kit from the CDN. I've also implemented the new View Transition API feature to enhance the user experience.

Firstly, unlike the name https://fontawesome.com/ isn't for fonts.