How to build a complete, real-world application from scratch with Ruby on Rails step by step.
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First things first, we need a Link model to store our
Analytics for links is a useful feature so lets record Views for links and show them in a graph
Copy to clipboard is a required feature for a URL shortener. We'll implement this with two JavaScript libraries (clipboardjs and tippy.js) and a Stimulus controller.
We're ready to deploy our URL Shortener to production and we're going to do that using Hatchbox.io
Anyone can add, edit, and delete any Link in our URL Shortener database. Your challenge is to add users, associate links with them and only allow editing of your own links.
Here's how we'd add Users and handle edit permissions for links. See how it compares to your implementation and consider the pros/cons of each approach.
Once our application has lots of links, it will become impossible to use. Let's add pagination to make our application usable once we have hundreds or thousands of links.
The Rails generator helpers have always been a little lacking in flexibility. While building the Madmin gem, I ran into an issue with the route generator and decided to take the extra time to contribute back to Rails.
Testing a gem or your Rails app against multiple Ruby and Rails versions is super useful, but we also take it a step further and test our gem against several different databases too
Rails apps and Rubygems might need to support multiple databases. We can use the DATABASE_URL environment variable to quickly swap out the database that Rails uses in CI, local testing, and more.
In this episode we will look at how to use Webmock to test our API Clients.
You might not realize your code has concepts that need to be extracted. Sometimes it's as simple as a small decorator around a Ruby class as we'll see in this lesson.
Whisper.cpp is an open source C/C++ port of OpenAI Whisper that we can use with Ruby for transcribing our videos. We'll also look at how ActiveStorage runs executables like ffmpeg to see how it works behind the scenes just like with what we're building.
Using Base62, we can take an Integer ID and compress it for short codes in our URLs
Decoding our Base62 encoded short codes is the next challenge
Now that we have Base62 encoding and decoding, we can tell Rails to use this for generating URL params and find
Next, we can build redirecting Short URLs to the URL on the Link
It's time we start cleaning up the design and UI for a better experience with our URL shortener.
Now that we've got a thorough test suite, we want to make sure tests are run anytime we push code to GitHub. We can setup GitHub Actions to test our code and automatically deploy it when tests pass.
Congratulations! We're all done! We now have a fully featured URL shortener that does everything we need plus some cool extras.
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