Consyncful

Contentful -> local database synchronisation for Rails

Requesting complicated models from the Contentful Delivery API in Rails applications is often too slow, and makes testing applications painful. Consyncful uses Contentful's syncronisation API to keep a local copy of the entire content in a Mongo database up to date.

Once the content is availble locally, finding and interact with contentful data is as easy as using Mongoid ODM.

This gem doesn't provide any intergration with the management api or any way to update contentful models from the local store. It is strictly read only.

Why do I have to use MongoDB?

Consyncful currently only supports Mongoid ODM because models have dynamic schemas. And that's all we've had a chance to work out so far. :) The same pattern might be able to be extended to work with ActiveRecord, but having to migrate the local database as well as your contentful content type's seems tedious.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'consyncful'

And then execute:

$ bundle

If you don't already use mongoid, generate a mongoid.yml by running:

$ rake g mongoid:config

Add an initializer: Consyncful uses contentful.rb so client options are as documented there.

  Consyncful.configure do |config|
    config.locale = 'en-NZ'
    config.contentful_client_options = {
      api_url: 'cdn.contentful.com',
      space: 'space_id',
      access_token: 'ACCESS TOKEN',
      environment: 'master',        # optional
      logger: Logger.new(STDOUT)    # optional for debugging
    }
  end

Usage

Creating contentful models in your rails app

Create models by inheriting from Consyncful::Base

class ModelName < Consyncful::Base
  contentful_model_name 'contentfulTypeName'
end

Model fields will be dynamicly assigned, but mongoid dynamic fields are not accessible if the entry has an empty field. If you want the accessor methods to be reliably available for fields it is recommended to define the fields in the model:

class ModelName < Consyncful::Base
  contentful_model_name 'contentfulTypeName'

  field :title
  field :is_awesome, type: Boolean
end

Contentful reference fields are a bit special compared with standard mongoid associations, Consyncful provides the following helpers to set up the correct relationships:

class ModelWithReferences < Consyncful::Base
  contentful_model_name 'contentfulTypeName'

  references_one :thing
  references_many :other_things
end

Syncronizing contentful data

To run a syncronization process run:

$ rake consyncful:sync

The first time you run this it will download all the contentful content, it will then check every 15 seconds for changes to the content and update/delete records in the database when changes are made in contentful.

If you want to syncronise from scratch run:

$ rake consyncful:refresh

It is recommended to refresh your data if you change model names.

Now you've synced your data, it is all available via your rails models

Finding and interacting with models

Querying

Models are available using standard mongoid queries.

instance = ModelName.find_by(instance: 'foo')

instance.is_awesome # true

References

References work like you woule expect:

instance = ModelWithReferences.find('contentfulID')

instance.thing # returns the referenced thing
instance.other_things # all the referenced things, polymorphic, so might be different types

Except: references_many associations return objects in a different order from how they are ordered in contentful. If you want them in the order they appare in contentful, use the .in_order helper:

instance.other_things.in_order # ordered the same as in contentful

Finding entrys from different content types

Because all contentful models are stored as polymorphic subtypes of Consyncful::Base, you can query all entries without knowing what type you are looking for:

  Consyncful::Base.where(title: 'a title') # [ #<ModelName>, #<OtherModelName> ]

Limitations

Locales

Current Consyncful only uses one globally configured locale to map the data to the database.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/boost/consyncful.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.