Use Orchestrate.io with a basic Rails Application - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a basic application running with ruby on rails. I use sqlite3 for development and postgres for production. I recently got access to Orchestrate.io and their student tier.
I would like to know how I could possibly use this with my application. I'm not even sure this is possible. My app is really simple (add-edit-delete). But it would be interesting to have a go at using the tools.
Mostly because I cannot find an efficient and free rails db text search.

Answer 1

You can definitely use Orchestrate as the backend for a Rails application.
A few different options:
The Orchestrate-Ruby client has both a method client & object client. Although the object client is still considered a work-in-progress, the method client provides a solid interface for connecting to the Orchestrate API.
Use an http library (such as rest-client or faraday) to make calls to the Orchestrate API.
There's also the Orchestrate-Rails gem. Your mileage may vary with this (last updated in April).
To use Orchestrate as the only backend (no postgres/mysql), I've found the best approach is to disable ActiveRecord:
When creating a new application, you can use -O to skip ActiveRecord:
rails new my_app -O
For existing applications:
1. Remove database adapter gems from your Gemfile (pg, mysql2, sqlite3, etc.)
2. Change your config/application.rb
Remove require 'rails/all line and require frameworks you want to use, for example:
require "action_controller/railtie"
require "action_mailer/railtie"
require "sprockets/railtie"
require "rails/test_unit/railtie"
3. Delete your database.yml file, db/schema.rb and migrations (if any)
4. Delete migration check in test/test_helper.rb
5. Delete any ActiveRecord configuration from your config/environments files (this is what is causing your error)
If you run into problems/errors, stack trace should give you sufficient information on what you need to change. You might for example have some ActiveRecord configuration in your initializers.
With the Orchestrate-Ruby client, you can define a model like so:
class Foo < Orchestrate::Collection
...
end
I'm still undecided on what the best approach for defining the Application object is, but one way I've done it is by making a global object with an initializer:
# /config/initializers/orchestrate.rb
$App = Orchestrate::Application.new(ENV['ORCHESTRATE_KEY']) # using dotenv gem
$App = Orchestrate::Application.new('your_key_here') # without dotenv
From here, you can then access the $App object in your controllers (to initialize the collection object):
class FoosController < ApplicationController
def index
#foos = Foo.new($App, "foos").each
end
end
Leveraging model concerns might be a better way to share the Application object/API key between models. Or you could roll your own classes on top of the method client.
Hope this helps!
I'll be looking into how to accomplish this in a more 'Railsy' way.
EDIT: also, textacular is a ruby gem which provides full-text search and indexing for postgres