Creating BeerSnob

Project Idea

I had a few ideas that I was considering for this project at first. I tossed around the idea of scraping through each year in the '90s and highlighting different trends, fads, pop culture, and new stories. I also considered scraping through popular songs and returning the original songs that the new song took samples from. That came closest to fruition but unfortunately I couldn't find a website conducive to this idea. I added it to my list of future projects. :)

I wanted my first project to be something useful–not just a throw-away program that I’d never touch after submission. I examined my interests and found that I could create an app at the intersection of beer and education. I found craftbeer.com to be a viable website for scraping and thus BeerSnob was born.

Starting the Project

I experienced quite a few delays in starting this project, each one pretty frustrating. I used the Visual Studio Code text editor in place of the Learn IDE and had several issues with setup that I had to solve–either through Google, message boards, or speaking with other developers and students. After fixing the settings to allow me to submit commit messages with titles and description (which is a coding habit I want to ingrain upon myself from the start) and then installing rvm to manage my rubies and gems, I was ready to dive in and begin coding my project.

Setup - Creating a Gem with Bundler

I installed and used bundler to set up my project, taking the following steps:

1. Open the terminal and cd into the folder in which you want to create your project (mine is called code).
2. Type in bundle gem then your project name. (Use an underscore instead of a hyphen to make your project name camel case.) Decide whether you want to use RSpec, MiniTest, or neither for development testing, use the MIT license for open sourcing regulation, and a code of conduct for any open source contributors to follow. Bundler then initializes a git repo for your project!

Setup - Connecting Your Project to GitHub

1. cd into your newly created project folder, then navigate to GitHub. Create a new repository with the same name as the project on your computer. Type git add . into your terminal, then enter the last three lines under the "create a new repository on the command line" option. They should look like:
   

   git commit -m "first commit"
   git remote add origin git@github.com:[your-username]/[your-project-name].git
   git push -u origin master
   

2. Refresh your GitHub page and you'll see your project and its files now in your GitHub repository.

3. To make sure you're working out of the correct repo, click on the green "Clone or download" button in your project's repository. Select "Clone with SSH" for a more secure connection. "Clone with HTTPS" will also work, however, you'll be required to supply your GitHub username and password each time you make a connection to your remote repo. Click on the clipboard image to copy the link and return to your terminal. Make sure you're working in the code folder (or whichever folder your project is stored in), then type git clone and paste the link to clone the correct repo for your project.

4. Your new project's repo folder should appear in your local code folder. Open your text editor of choice and cd into the project folder to start working.

Hint: To test your text editor's connectivity to GitHub, make a change to your README.md file and save. In the terminal, type git add ., git commit -m "Modify README.md", and git push. When you refresh your GitHub page, you should see the updated commit message and two commits.

-OR-

Type git remote -v into your terminal. If you're connected correctly to your remote repo, you should see the following lines:

your-project-name $ origin git@github.com:[your-username]/[your-project-name].git (fetch)
your-project-name $ origin git@github.com:[your-username]/[your-project-name].git (push)

Setup - The Executable File

1. Add your executable file (the file that makes the app run) in the bin folder. I named mine beer-snob. (Remember to add the shebang line #!/usr/bin/env ruby at the top of your file so your computer knows to use ruby to run the program.)
2. We want the user to be able to run the app right out of the terminal using bash instead of explicitly calling on a ruby interpreter to run it. This means we have to change the executable file's permissions. We can do this by cding into the bin folder and entering chmod +x followed by the executable file's name.

Program Files

I employed the encapsulation principle in creating and writing my various program files. All components of the app (gems and files) are required in an environment file called beer_snob.rb, which in turn is required in the executable file.

BeerSnob Executable File

The app's executable file employs only one line of code to start the program, however, it does have a few other requirements:

1. As mentioned earlier, the shebang line (#!/usr/bin/env ruby) tells your computer that the file is written in ruby. Therefore, this needs to be the very first line of your program to ensure that your computer reads and processes the app correctly.
2. The next line is require bundler/setup which enables the app to load all necessary gems and dependencies from the Gemfile by adding them to the load path.
3. The third line is the app's environment file. Mine reads require beer_snob. This enables your executable file to access all the gems and program files contained within your environment.
4. Then of course follows the line that starts the program. Mine reads CLI.new.learn.

CLI File

The purpose of the CLI file is to call methods that act as basic functions of the program. I created a basic run method #learn which first instantiates an instance variable using the Beers and Scraper classes and then uses that variable in the following methods:

• #greeting: welcomes the user to the app
• #list_style_families: lists the 15 beer style families
• #top_menu: handles the user input of which family they wish to explore and executes the appropriate action
• #list_beer_styles: lists the beer styles within whichever style family the user chose
• #sub_menu: handles the user input of which beer style they wish to explore and returns the appropriate information
• #exit: displays a closing message and exits out of the program

I incorporated decorative elements in my puts Strings by using ASCII art in the #exit method and the colorize gem to distinguish headers and categories from general information.

Scraper

I decided to start my project by creating a scraper.rb file. I actually began the file in a practice repo to mess around and see what I could come up with. When it started coming together, I migrated my work into a file in my gem repo.

For each beer I wanted to store the style name, family name, and a brief description of its characteristics. Since some beers have a longer description than others, I at first decided to store only the first paragraph of each beer description. Through helping another Flatiron student with her project, I discovered a method which could return multiple paragraphs of text, depending on the parameters I set. I liked this execution much better as it allowed the app to pull all text for the beer styles with a multi-paragraph description without compromising other, shorter beer style description texts.

Next I wanted to store the listed examples of brewery and beer name for each style. This was a little tricky because my scraper kept returning the list of breweries followed by the list of beer names instead of returning them as key/value pairs. In the end, I created a nested array composed of brewery/beer name hashes by creating an iteration inside of the main beer style iteration. By doing this, I was able to create and store key/value pairs of the commercial examples.

Beers File

I wrote the beers.rb file as abstractly as possible to enable it to create new arrays and object attributes from whichever hash arguments were fed into the method. These methods in turn created the objects that were used in the cli.rb file to display the scraped information.

Art File

The art.rb file houses ASCII art which I incorporated in my CLI#exit method.

Troubleshooting

Scraping

For you to be able to get a sense of the document structure of the website I was scraping from, I'm including the site link here: Beer Styles Study Guide

The site that I decided to scrape is structured differently than I would have done it. Not all the HTML elements are nested properly and a lot of them either don't have classes or they're not descriptive of the actual element. Therefore, when scraping the site, I originally decided to iterate over the <li> tags and use indexes to draw out the information and associate it to the proper key. Unfortunately, some of the beer styles include the "Brewing and Conditioning Process" characteristic while other do not. I discovered this after my CLI displayed info associated with the wrong characteristic for some of the beer styles, shifting them down by one line item. So I went back to the scraper drawing board.

I reviewed earlier scraper labs and got an idea from the Student Scraper Lab. I created a subiteration within my #scrape method to create a key/value pair only if the key existed. I assigned the new key to be created from the param class and its corresponding value from the value class nested within the <li> tags. This process scraped more information than I want to display, but that wasn’t an issue since I could choose which information I wanted to display in the CLI class.

I didn't have to change anything for the “Commercial Examples” characteristic since I also created a subiteration for those, which dug deeper down in the nested levels to retrieve the specific beer and brewery information. However, I did have to treat the “Alcohol” characteristic differently because instead of storing its value in a <span class="value"> element, the website inserted the value text directly inside the <li> element. Thankfully, I was able to keep my indexing method for this characteristic as it's the first line under the "Style A-Z" category and, therefore, is unaffected by the addition of other characteristics.

Simplifying the Program

Even after making the above changes I still ran into issues. When writing the #initialize method in the Beers class, I employed the #send method in order to create the object’s attributes from the key/value pairs. However, since the keys were Strings and not Symbols, I wasn’t able to convert the pairs to attributes using the #send method. I could probably figure out a way to do it if I researched it more but I decided to eliminate these characteristics altogether and readdress the problem at a later date.

Project Demo Video