Build a news site with Rubyflow

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Ruby journalist extraordinaire, Peter Cooper, is a busy man. Chances are you’re already following his work to bring you the latest Ruby news on sites such as Ruby Inside and RubyFlow. Late last year he even added a tremendously useful site oriented towards iPhone and iPod Touch development called Mobile Orchard. Somewhere along the line he was also generous enough to leak the source code for Rubyflow, and now a version of that is available through Sutto’s Github repository.That’s great news for anyone looking to start their own news site, especially since it’s a breeze to get working on Heroku.

Start by cloning the source from Github:

$ git clone git://github.com/Sutto/rubyflow.git

Rubyflow depends the thoughtbot-factorygirl gem, so next we’ll make sure to install that and unpack it in vendor/gems:

$ rake gems:install $ rake gems:unpack

I also found that the captcha used in Rubyflow’s user registration requires “digest/sha1” to be required explicitly, so go ahead and add

require 'digest/sha1'

at the bottom of config/environment.rb. Once you’ve done that it’s time to commit our changes to git:

$ git add . $ git commit -m "vendored gems and required digest/sha1"

With that out of the way, it’s time to create an app on Heroku and deploy to it:

$ cd rubyflow $ heroku create Created http://high-fire-37.heroku.com/ | git@heroku.com:high-fire-37.git Added git remote heroku $ git push heroku master ... App deployed to Heroku.

Finally, we run migrations to set up the application database:

$ heroku rake db:migrate

…and there you have it!

Be sure to read the docs on site configuration and customization here.

Enjoy!