I’ve decided to release Picsta’s source code on GitHub under GPLv2. Picsta is a Ruby on Rails web application for sharing photos with groups of family and friends designed for mobile and desktop. My goal is to help other Rails developers with their app. Providing the source code for a reasonably functional web-app gives some pointer on how I accomplished things. Some things are good and several are probably bad. I did all of this development during the first few sleepless months after our daughter’s birth. Over the next few weeks I’ll try to write-up more technical details depending on feedback.
Some key features:
- Based on Rails Composer
- Heroku hosted
- Devise for authentication and invitation plug-in
- Consul for authorization
- Twitter Bootstrap for layout
- Carrierwave and Fog for uploading image assets to AWS S3 services
- Masonry for slick block-style image display
- Mailchimp and Mandrill for bulk and transactional emails
- Bloggy for integrated blog
- Stripe for monthly subscription
- RMagick / Mini-Magick for image processing
- Public Activity for event tracking
I have integrated a lot of existing pieces and parts. Along with the features I’ve written a number of cucumber and rspec tests for the system’s features. The tests alone are useful as examples of unit and functional testing of Rails.
Please let me know if you find it useful or have any questions. The web app is currently running at beta.picsta.co with my family and friends as users.