Test Driving a Rails API - Part One

• cal_api

  1 0 4.7 Ruby

  A Rails API for managing calendar events

Clone the repository yourself and follow along.

• PostgreSQL

  405 14,673 10.0 C

  Mirror of the official PostgreSQL GIT repository. Note that this is just a *mirror* - we don't work with pull requests on github. To contribute, please see https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch

  

A running Rails application needs a database to connect to. You may already have your database of choice installed, but if not, I recommend PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short. On a Mac, probably the easiest way to install it is with Posrgres.app. Another option, the one I prefer, is to use Homebrew. With Homebrew installed, this command will install PostgreSQL version 16 along with libpq:

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• chruby

  17 2,834 2.6 Shell

  Changes the current Ruby

Let’s get started. I prefer to manage my Ruby installations on my development machine with chruby paired with ruby-install. Another outstanding set of tools is rbenv with ruby-build. I highly recommend installing Ruby with one of those two sets of tools. Follow the instructions on their project’s READMEs. For this article, I’ll be running Ruby (MRI) v3.3.0.

• rubygems

  212 3,550 9.9 Ruby

  Library packaging and distribution for Ruby.

  

With Ruby installed, you can now manage your RubyGems with the gem command. Install the Rails gem or update if you already have it.

• ruby-install

  7 1,858 7.6 Shell

  Installs Ruby, JRuby, Rubinius, TruffleRuby or MRuby

Let’s get started. I prefer to manage my Ruby installations on my development machine with chruby paired with ruby-install. Another outstanding set of tools is rbenv with ruby-build. I highly recommend installing Ruby with one of those two sets of tools. Follow the instructions on their project’s READMEs. For this article, I’ll be running Ruby (MRI) v3.3.0.

• PostgresApp

  58 7,111 9.2 Makefile

  The easiest way to get started with PostgreSQL on the Mac

  

A running Rails application needs a database to connect to. You may already have your database of choice installed, but if not, I recommend PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short. On a Mac, probably the easiest way to install it is with Posrgres.app. Another option, the one I prefer, is to use Homebrew. With Homebrew installed, this command will install PostgreSQL version 16 along with libpq:

• rbenv

  68 15,774 5.6 Shell

  Manage your app's Ruby environment

  

Let’s get started. I prefer to manage my Ruby installations on my development machine with chruby paired with ruby-install. Another outstanding set of tools is rbenv with ruby-build. I highly recommend installing Ruby with one of those two sets of tools. Follow the instructions on their project’s READMEs. For this article, I’ll be running Ruby (MRI) v3.3.0.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• HomeBrew

  1,281 39,373 10.0 Ruby

  🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux)

  

A running Rails application needs a database to connect to. You may already have your database of choice installed, but if not, I recommend PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short. On a Mac, probably the easiest way to install it is with Posrgres.app. Another option, the one I prefer, is to use Homebrew. With Homebrew installed, this command will install PostgreSQL version 16 along with libpq:

• ruby-build

  24 3,846 8.8 Shell

  A tool to download, compile, and install Ruby on Unix-like systems.

  

Let’s get started. I prefer to manage my Ruby installations on my development machine with chruby paired with ruby-install. Another outstanding set of tools is rbenv with ruby-build. I highly recommend installing Ruby with one of those two sets of tools. Follow the instructions on their project’s READMEs. For this article, I’ll be running Ruby (MRI) v3.3.0.

• ruby-pg

  9 751 7.5 C

  A PostgreSQL client library for Ruby

If you installed Postgres via Homebrew, you need to configure bundler so that when it installs the pg gem, it knows where to find the pg_config executable, which is installed as part of Postgres. The pg gem is the Ruby interface to Postgres and requires pg_config during installation. We can use this command to configure bundler so that it can find it and successfully install pg.

• dotenv

  19 6,502 8.6 Ruby

  A Ruby gem to load environment variables from `.env`. (by bkeepers)

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.

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