All posts by moore - 32. page

I have recently spent a fair bit of time working with Sharetribe, an open source, MIT licensed marketplace platform that also powers a hosted solution.

First, let me say that the software is the least significant piece of a marketplace (like AirBnB).  The least significant! (Check out the Sharetribe Academy for some great content about the other steps.)  

But it is still a necessary component.  If you can get by with the hosted solution to prove out your idea, I suggest you do so–$100/month is a lot cheaper than hours of software development. There may come a time when you want to customize the sharetribe interface beyond what javascript injection can do.  If this is the case, you need a developer.  And that developer needs an environment.  That’s what this post is really about.

The sharetribe github readme explains the installation process pretty well, but I find it tedious, so I created a quick start vagrant VM. This VM has a sharetribe installation ready to go.  I use vagrant 1.6.3 and Virtualbox 5–google around for instructions on how to get those up and running. The guest VM is Ubuntu 14.04. This VM uses rvm to manage ruby versions, but I couldn’t be bothered with nvm. It will install sharetribe 5.8.0 and all needed components.

Assuming you have vagrant and virtual box installed, download the Vagrant file and put it in the directory where you want to work. Edit it and change any options you’d like. The options I changed were the port forwarding (I set it to 3003), networking options, and the amount of memory used (I allocate 4GB).

Then run vagrant box add http://www.mooreds.com/sharetribe/sharetribe-base-mooreds.box --name sharetribe-base-mooreds to download the file. It’s downloading a large file from my (small) server, so expect it to take a while (hours).

Then run vagrant init.

When you can login (password is vagrant if you use vagrant putty or you can use vagrant ssh) you can go to the sharetribe directory and do the following:

• fork the sharetribe repo
• update your git remote so that your origin is your forked repo (and not mine, because you won’t get write access to mine)
• create a branch in your repo off of the 5.8.0 tag. There’s one startup script I tweaked a bit, but you can just ignore those changes.
• update your mysql password: SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('MyNewPass');
• start mailcatcher listening to all interfaces: mailcatcher --ip=0.0.0.0
• start the rails/react server: foreman start -f Procfile.static
• visit lvh.me:3003 and start your server
• set up your local super user and first marketplace
• edit the url you are redirected to to have the correct external port on it (from the vagrant settings): from http://testdev.lvh.me:3000/?auth=baEOj7kFrsw to http://testdev.lvh.me:3003/?auth=baEOj7kFrsw for example

This is running sharetribe 5.8.0, and I’m sure there will be follow on releases. Here’s how to sync the releases coming from the sharetribe team with your current repo. I’ve taken the liberty of creating an upstream branch for you.

This doesn’t cover deploying the code anywhere–I’d recommend this gist. Make sure you read the comments! Or I can install a vanilla version of sharetribe to heroku for a flat fee–contact me for details.

I have using the excellent Sharetribe framework to build a marketplace for food businesses and commercial kitchens for my new startup, The Food Corridor.  However, it didn’t have support for generating a sitemap.xml file for all the listings available.

How is someone going to find the right kitchen space when they use google, but we don’t have a sitemap so google can keep apprised of all the options?

This wouldn’t do.  So, I added the ability to generate a sitemap for all the listings in the marketplace.

First off, install the gem–I used sitemap_generator as it seemed to do what I needed–allow me to call out certain routes and add them to my sitemap.  Then you need to create a configuration file, at config/sitemap.rb.  Mine looks like:

SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = "https://"+APP_CONFIG.domain

SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do
  Listing.where(deleted: false, open: true).find_each do |listing|
    add listing_path(listing), :lastmod => listing.updated_at
  end
end

Then I just ran bundle exec rake sitemap:refresh:no_ping and a sitemap.xml.gz was generated in my public directory.

If you are running on AWS or someplace else with a persistent filesystem, you can skip to the text starting with “Then, I scheduled”.

If you are running on a PAAS like Heroku, where you don’t get a persistent filesystem, you’ll want to push this generated file to a persistent place. I chose S3. Since sharetribe already has paperclip as a dependency, I used the instructions here and here, with a few modifications for sharetribe.

My rake task to upload the sitemap file was:

require 'aws'
namespace :sitemap do
  desc 'Upload the sitemap files to S3'
  task upload_to_s3: :environment do
    s3 = AWS::S3.new(
      access_key_id: ENV['aws_access_key_id'],
      secret_access_key: ENV['aws_secret_access_key']
    )
    bucket = s3.buckets[ENV['s3_bucket_name']]
      file = File.join(Rails.root, "public", "sitemap.xml.gz")
      path = "sitemap/sitemap.xml.gz"

      begin
        object = bucket.objects[path]
        object.write(file: file)
        object.acl=(:public_read)
      rescue Exception => e
        raise e
      end
  end
end

I then run the sitemap:refresh:no_ping and upload_to_s3 tasks in the same heroku scheduled task: rake sitemap:refresh:no_ping sitemap:upload_to_s3. If you don’t do that (and instead do separate dynos) then the upload task won’t have access to the file (because it will have been generated on the first dyno’s filesystem).

You also need to make sure to add a sitemap controller to redirect from yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz to the S3 bucket (again, as outlined in the articles linked above.

Then, I scheduled a daily refresh of the sitemap.xml file and submitted the file to relevant search engines.

Things I didn’t do:

• handle more than 50k urls
• support multiple communities (not really needed for me, but I bet if the folks behind sharetribe.com wanted to use this, they’d want such support).
• add the sitemap.xml file to my robots.txt file, as outlined here.