This is just a version of Mad Libs written mostly in JavaScript, with a Ruby/Sinatra backend. Other programming notes below.
Go to youmadlibs.herokuapp.com if I still have it running there.
Clone the repo into a new directory. Make sure Ruby is installed (v. 2.4.0),
as well as bundler (gem install bundler). Run bundle install. You might
need to install some gems by hand but I don't think so. I think the only files
you might need to edit in order to get it running locally are environment.rb
and database.yml. In addition, you'll want to execute rake db:migrate.
(Precede commands by bundle exec if necessary.)
To run the server locally, which is Sinatra (not Rails), simply navigate to
the app's top-level directory and execute ruby app.rb. Then view the page
(it's a single-page app) in a browser at http://localhost:4567.
Set up the repo on your local Linux environment first, make sure it's been made
into a git repo (git init etc.) which is updated with your changes. You'll
also need to install the Heroku CLI app. Then create the Heroku app (see
heroku.com for instructions on that) and push it using git push heroku master (assuming your version is on the master branch). Make sure you've got
a Heroku postgres add-on for the app. You'll need to get the postgres://...
address for your database, and then set the environment variable (a good way is
with heroku config:set DATABASE_URL= followed by that database URL) for
DATABASE_URL if you use my database.yml; if you fiddle with that, you
might need other environment variables. Once the database is going, you'll
need to migrate the database on Heroku using heroku run rake db:migrate and
then maybe heroku restart if it's not running.
If you have trouble installing, email me at yo.larrysanger@gmail.com.
{$name1:child's name}'s favorite subject is {noun:school subject} while {$name2:child's name}'s is {noun:another school subject}. The trouble is that the kids {verb:plural present intransitive} whenever they study together. But this makes Mama very {adjective:describes a person}, which isn't always a good thing.
{$name1} and {$name2} are good students, but they are bad {$noun1:plural, role/job}. As {$noun1} they are very {adjective:bad in kid way}. But since Mama {verb:third person present transitive} {$name1} and {$name2}, maybe it's OK.
While it requires some grammatical acumen, you really do sort of have to specify such things as grammatical person (first, second, third person), number (singular or plural), transitive or intransitive of verbs, etc. Otherwise your user will write something nonsensical.
Libraries/gems include jQuery for JS, Materialize for CSS, Warden for user authentication, and ActiveRecord for an ORM. Databases are Sqlite3 for development and Postgres for production. Everything is written with deployment on Heroku in mind. See Sources below for relevant notes on making this work.
Most the logic is in JavaScript/jquery, located at public/js/main.js. The only thing the server does is deliver the data, save new madlibs submitted by users, and handle user authentication. Almost all of the HTML is created on the fly by jQuery. This is a new programming style for me and sometimes it might seem a little inefficient, but I find it extremely clarifying and much simpler, in the long run, than loads of complex HTML and CSS. The CSS library is Materialize, which my 11-year-old son introduced me to.
The JS uses quite a few functions that don't, strictly speaking, need to be
functions. It does this just for neatness (and future reusability). Rather than
keeping track of arguments and making the functions self-contained, I've used
several global variables--some, like all_texts (which is declared in
views/layout.erb), text, metadata, and user_msg (declared atop
public/js/main.js), being quite important).
The directory structure is sort of MVC, but without controllers. The /text
directory is simply a collection of texts you can use to input. These need to
be put in a correctly-formatted db/seeds.rb file. The Sinatra routes can be
found in routes/routes.rb but also in lib/warden.rb for the authentication
routes.
The models are kept to a minimum since so much work (such as validation) is done by client-side JS.
The very first version of the site was in plain Sinatra and simply used JSON files for storage. But Heroku doesn't allow scripts to directly change text files. You have to use a database if you want the user to be able to save anything.
So, in order to use Sinatra with Postgres and Active Record on Heroku, I initially followed a good tutorial by David McCoy that allowed me to post a version without user accounts. But then of course to allow editing, I needed to add user accounts.
I decided to use Warden for authentication, but unfortunately there was little documentation of how to get Warden to work with Sinatra. I started with a short but helpful tutorial by Erik Chacon. That didn't get me far enough. To fill in the gaps, this tutorial by Steve Klise was very helpful, but being from 2013, it was quite old and used DataMapper for an ORM. At that point I had basic user accouts, but I was using DataMapper and Sqlite3 for the User class and ActiveRecord and Postgres for the Madlib class!
I decided to get rid of DataMapper, but to do that, I had to edit a lot of the Warden set-up. To do that, I ended up following this Sinatra "skeleton" by Simon Neutert (itself based on the tutorials by Chacon and Klise).
I still had to do quite a bit of coding on my own to create accounts and then add editing and deleting functions.
That's where I am right now (as of April 22, 2018).
The biggest things that need doing are (1) actually make sure only authorized users can edit and delete a madlib and (2) get the latest code working on Heroku (it's not working for some reason as of April 22, 2018).
I also want to do a massive refactoring of main.js. The whole thing needs to be redesigned and made more modular.
Also:
- Design edit & delete buttons.
- Create page allowing users to view just their own madlibs.
- Show numbers of views and of fill-outs of each madlib.
- Save the fill-outs (if the user so chooses); let others display them.
- Rate madlibs and allow sorting based on rating.
- Rate fill-outs and allow sorting based on rating.