MAL Heatmap

https://malheatmap.com

Built with

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Bulma CSS

Motivation

I've made this experiment to play around with some cool Rails features, like ActiveStorage and ActionCable. Also, I want to try web scrapping with ruby and learn a little bit more about it.

Also, this allowed me to test some gems, like ViewComponent.

How it works

The web app just displays the processed data and a set of jobs do the hard and dirty work of crawling, process, save data.

So, when the user subscribes to its profile to be tracked, a job will be triggered to check if the user exists on MAL and then crawl and process the data. While that, the UI will be connected to a channel awaiting a response from the job, once the job is completed, the user will be redirected to his page. After subscribing, a recurring job will repeat the crawling process daily to keep the user's data updated.

Demo

Developing

Requirements:

• PostgreSQL 13.3+
• Redis 6.2+
• Ruby 3.0.2
• Node 14.17.0
• ImageMagick

Since this app is a classical Rails project, there is nothing special here, to setup project:

bin/setup

This script will create the database and install all dependencies.

To run the app:

bin/rails server

To run unit tests:

bin/rails test

Integration tests:

bin/rails test:system

To run all linters and test suites:

bin/qa

Deployment

This app is deployed with Dokku hosted on a VPS.

Auxiliary tools:

• Rollbar for error tracking and uptime monitoring
• Matomo for analytics
• Amazon S3 as storage service
• Sidekiq as background job adapter

Other Inspirations

• MAL Signature
• anime.plus