Keep your site as fresh as your code

I am actively working on PoolParty, but the website doesn’t necessarily show that the project is in active development.

Luckily, it is hosted at github and they have an API to access their changesets. Now, on PoolParty’s website, I am surfacing the latest changeset’s time, message and author as well as a link to the changeset.

How?

Code (shortened for brevity purposes):

$:.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__))
require "rubygems"
require "yaml"
require "open-uri"

class Grab
  @url = "http://github.com/api/v1/yaml/auser/pool-party/commits/master"
  @refresh_after = 20

  def self.latest_commit_object
    o = yaml["commits"][0]
    {
      :message => o["message"].gsub(/\n/, ""),
      :date => Time.parse(o["committed_date"]).timeago,
      :by => o["committer"]["name"],
      :url => o["url"]
    }
  end
end

The github api is slick. As you can see from above, the format for the api url looks like

http://github.com/api/version/format/username/repository/type/object

Where the variables there correspond to:

• Current version: v1
• Acceptable formats: json, xml, yaml
• Acceptable types: commits, commit

Grabbing the latest changesets from the url as YAML format, we can quickly and easily parse the message into a useful hash.

I personally like the “# hours ago” syntax that 2.0 sites are popping up with everywhere, so I just added a timeago method that is very similar to the one included with rails. The source is attached.

Since I don’t want poolpartyrb.com’s load time to be dependent upon how fast it can hit github, I cache the variable so every 20 views it refreshes.

Use in Rails

Save both the files (attached below) to your lib directory.

Add this to your environment.rb

require 'grab'

Then add this helper to your application_helper.rb

  def show_latest_commit
    @latest_commit = Grab.latest_commit_object

    <<-EOS
Latest commit
      #{@latest_commit[:message]}
by #{@latest_commit[:by]}

      #{@latest_commit[:date]}
    EOS
  end

How to use in sinatra

I use this on poolpartyrb.com, which is a sinatra site. I do basically the same as above, but generally render the code in haml instead

  $:.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__))
  require "sinatra"
  require 'grab'

  get '/' do
    @latest_commit = Grab.latest_commit_object
    haml :home, :layout => :layout
  end

Then in my home.haml

  .note
    %strong
      Latest commit
    %br
    ==
    = @latest_commit[:message]
    
    .highlight
      == by #{@latest_commit[:by]}
    = @latest_commit[:date]

Get the code here

edit: updated location of code

Tagged as: git, github, Rails, Ruby, Sinatra