Facebook Clone

This is the final project in The Odin Project's Ruby on Rails curriculum.

Demo App

You can view this web app on Heroku. The heroku server will need a little bit of time to fire up a dyno, so please be patient with this free service.

If you would like to create reciprocal friendships, you may log in as any of the sample users. Please note: This sample data is reset daily, so any changes to friendships, posts, etc. will be deleted in the next 24 hours.

Email:

username@firefly.net

Sample usernames: malcolm, zoe, wash, inara, kaylee, river, simon, book, and jayne

Password:

serenity

Project Requirements

This project is to replicate the core functionality of Facebook using Ruby on Rails. It is not expected to use any JavaScript for this project.

Basic Features => Users should be able to:

• Choose to sign in with Devise or their Facebook account.
• Upload a profile picture.
• Create posts.
• Send and receive friendship requests.
• View notifications of friendship requests.
• View newsfeed of their friend's posts.
• Comment on their friend's posts.
• Like their friend's posts.

Extra credit features:

• Allow users to have image-based or text-based posts.
• Use ActiveStorage to handle image uploading.
• Use Hotwire to handle real-time updates of posts, comments & likes.
• Use a rake task to manage sample data.

Personal Lessons and Reflections

After completing the core project requirements, I decided to challenge myself with a few extra credit features. These features are where I really had to expand on the things that I've learned and read through a lot of new documentation.

Polymorphism

I learned a lot about polymorphic relationships during this project. Once I wrapped my head around it, I discovered the ability to use delegated_type which helped my views be more readable.

Cloudinary

I used ActiveStorage and Cloudinary to handle the images for the user's profile pictures and photo posts. I wasn't entirely sure where to begin so I used this article to point me the right direction. In hindsight, Cloudinary has great documentation and covered this same material thoroughly.

Testing

I learned how to test each feature as I built it. Most of the time, there was relevant documentation about testing. For example, the omniauth gem had great documentation on testing. Occasionally, I would have to do additional research, such as how to test ActiveStorage attachments or mailers.

Rake Tasks

Since anyone can sign in as a sample user to create reciprocal friendships, I am using a rake task rails db:populate_sample_data to automatically reset the database every day.

Hotwire & Turbo Streams

Even though this project specifically states to not worry about using JavaScript, I really wanted to see a comment or like appear without having to refresh the entire page. I've seen a lot of discussion about Hotwire lately, so I decided to give it a try! It doesn't work out-of-the-box with Devise and OmniAuth, so I had to use this GoRail's video and article to get it working correctly. In addition, I had to remove Devise's current_user from my views, because Hotwire requires partials to be free of global references.

Local Installation

• Prerequisites: Rails, Git, and Bundler
• Clone this repo (instructions)
• Navigate into this project's directory cd social_media
• Install the required gems, by running bundle install
• This app uses figaro to manage secrets. You will need to create your own secrets for cloudinary, facebook, and gmail.
• Create and seed the database, by running rails db:setup
• Start the local server, by running rails server
• View by visiting localhost:3000 in a web browser

Running the tests

• To run the entire test suite

  rspec
  

• You can specify one spec folder to run a group tests, such as

  rspec spec/system
  

• You can specify one spec file to run a single set of tests, such as

  rspec spec/services/friendship_manager_spec.rb