Recreate the GitHub profile page (with real, live data) in a Rails application. Use GitHub's public API.
After completing this assignment, you should...
- Understand how Rails views can present HTML and CSS.
- Understand how information is passed between Rails controllers and Rails views.
- Understand how HTML forms pass parameters to Rails
- Be able to write ERB.
- Be able to build a Rails application to consume and data from a public-facing JSON API.
- Be able to experiment with and research CSS in order to mimic a design as closely as possible.
- A Repository. Create your own repository for this assignment.
- A test suite. Build your application using TDD. Your test suite must include unit tests and controller tests.
In this assignment, you will be building a Rails application which consumes information from the GitHub API and presents it back to the user on one of your own views. When the user sees the view in your application (perhaps at localhost:3000/repositories/), it should show them a page that looks as much like the GitHub profile repositories page as possible. Here is an example link to the repositories page:
https://github.com/masonfmatthews?tab=repositories
You will notice a lot going on on this page, from styling to navigation bars to icons. You won't get to it all, so as you're selecting sections of the page to work on, keep in mind that the most important part is for the information on the page to be accurate and pulled from the API.
Your application should have TWO pages. The root page can be very simple. It should show a text field and a button. Feel free to add whatever styling or headers you see fit. In the text field, the user should enter a GitHub username (e.g. masonfmatthews). The submit button should pass this information on to your second page, which will display your clone of the GitHub profile page for that user.
Your Rails application will not need to have any database tables.
Once again, you're going to find that this is a LOT of work. There's so much to do here that you're not going to finish it all. Use this as an exercise in choosing your battles, but also make sure that you're PRACTICING DISCIPLINE. This includes:
- Writing tests BEFORE writing code
- Making small parts work rather than trying to tackle everything at once
- Committing often
- Actually writing something (even a short something) in the README
Since this is so much work, set a time limit for yourself, then just stop when you reach it. If everything that you've done before that time is disciplined, you'll have something useful at the end regardless of when you stop.
For Hard Mode, make all the links on your two pages work, but have them redirect to the real pages on github.com.
For Nightmare Mode, implement your Public Activity Page in a second view.