What is this thing?

Veggietables is a Rails 3 web application for managing the logistics of just-in-time (i.e., warehouse-less) food rescue. It keeps track of donors, recipients, a pickup and delivery schedule, and all the volunteers responsible for doing the work. It sends reminders to users about their pickups. The site also logs how much food is rescued, and can automatically issue receipts for donations.

The app was first developed by Boulder Food Rescue, and then forked to adapt it to the needs of TC Food Justice. The code was originally written by Caleb Phillips, a co-founder of Boulder Food Rescue and adjunct Computer Science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Who uses it? (And how can I?)

Currently, Veggietables is live at http://veggietables.tcfoodjustice.org If you're keen to use it, shoot an email to Hannah at tc food justice (dot) org, and I can set you up with an account. Alternatively, if you would like to fork the source and hack on it yourself you are welcome to. This code is licensed under a Beerware-style license:

As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return.

Who is responsible?

This version of the app was forked and developed by a team of interns at Software for Good as a part of SfG's Giving Program. Software for Good continues to maintain this code to support Twin Cities Food Justice.

How can I help?

If you want to help with development, feel free to fork the project. If you have something to submit upstream, send a pull request from your fork. If you're trying to setup a dev environment, keep reading.

You can also donate to Twin Cities Food Justice.

General Tech Overview

The software's main goal is to keep a record of what food got picked up, when, and by whom and, to some degree, where it was delivered. The key database relations are:

• Logs - history of what was picked up, when, how and by whom. Log entries are generated from the schedule three days in advance.
• Schedule Chains - Schedule of each route, where food is taken from one or more donors and given to one or more recipients
• Locations - Donors or recpients, places where food comes from or goes to
• Volunteers - The main user table, which authentication happens against
• Regions - Keeps, e.g., Denver's stuff separate from Seattle's stuff

Besides that, there are some secondary relationships:

• Food Types - e.g., produce or bakery
• Transport Types - e.g., bike or car
• Scale Types - e.g., floor scale or bathroom scale
• Absences - tracks when volunteers leave
• Assignments - list of which region each volunteer belongs to
• Cell Carriers - hacky way to do email->sms that should be replaced

Functionally, the app works as you would expect. It's a MVC-paradigm app in the traditional Rails 3 sense. There is minimal front-end interaction and very little javascript outside of a few basic JQuery things and stuff like Datatables, Highcharts, and Select2.

There is a basic JSON API, which is provided by some controller methods (look for responds_to :json). You can see the routes with rake routes;

Preparing a Development Environment

Prerequisites

• Ruby 2.1
• Rails 3.2.16 and the rest of the dependencies in the Gemfile
• Postgresql 9.3 or greater (runs on at least 9.4.4)
• A reasonable operating system (e.g., Linux or Mac, Windows if you're saucy)
• Various dependencies for the above

Setup

1. Clone the repository to your machine.

git clone https://github.com/softwareforgood/food-rescue-robot.git
cd food-rescue-robot
bundle install

2. You'll need to create a database and user:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ psql
> CREATE DATABASE bfr_webapp_db;
> CREATE DATABASE bfr_webapp_db_test;
> CREATE ROLE bfr_webapp_user WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'changeme';
> GRANT ALL ON DATABASE bfr_webapp_db TO bfr_webapp_user;
> GRANT ALL ON DATABASE bfr_webapp_db_test TO bfr_webapp_user;
> \q
$ exit

3. Create a .env file from .env.example

cp .env.example .env

4. Set local environment variables in your .env file:

Run rake secret from the command line to generate a secret key base for your app.

SECRET_KEY_BASE=[Paste your secret key base here]
GMAPS_API_KEY=[Use your own Google maps API key (optional)]
DB_DEV_USER=bfr_webapp_user
DB_DEV_PASSWORD=[Use your local Postgres password, if any, for bfr_webapp_user]
DB_TEST_USER=bfr_webapp_user
DB_TEST_PASSWORD=[Use your local Postgres password, if any, for bfr_webapp_user]

5. Load Development Database Schema:

bundle exec rake db:schema:load

Warning: bundle exec rake db:migrate currently does not work due to default scopes an improper order of columns added to the database with migrations. bundle exec rake db:schema:load will build your tables instead.

6. Seed Development Database

bundle exec rake db:seed

Note: This creates an admin volunteer and other required bits. You should look it over.

7. Load Test Database Schema

bundle exec rake db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=test

Running It

You should be able to simply:

  $ bundle exec rails server

This starts a thin server on localhost:3000, which you can get at with your browser.

Also, beware that some crucial functions, like generating log entries from the schedule, and sending emails are executed by cron, daily or weekly. If you want to work on those bits, you may be keen to run these:

bundle exec rake foodrobot:generate_logs
bundle exec rake foodrobot:send_reminders
bundle exec rake foodrobot:send_weekly_summary

Generating Sample Data

The seeds command generates a regular volunteer and an admin volunteer for you. Please review seeds.rb. You can make more regions / volunteers with this code:

$ rails console
region = Region.create(name: "Twin Cities")

volunteer = Volunteer.new(email: "[email protected]", password: "changeme", password_confirmation: "changeme", assigned: true)
volunteer.admin = true
volunteer.regions << region
volunteer.save!

Additionally:

Run:

$ bundle exec rake db:sample_region

Note: Running the db:sample_region rake task will create a new Region in your database and populate it with a bunch of random data (volunteers, donors, recipients, schedule chains, etc.). For more info on what exactly is created, see lib/sample_data/region_data.rb.

Note: Region admins will be created for the new region with email addresses based on the region's name. For example, if the region name is San Francisco, the created region admins will have email addresses: [email protected], [email protected], etc. Their passwords will all be password.

Note: The db:sample_region rake task does not create any Log records, so you'll have to run the rake task to generate logs based on the newly created schedule chains: bundle exec rake foodrobot:generate_logs.

Hosting

The current production version is hosted via Heroku, collaborators can push to/pull from Heroku once their repository has been setup. To do this, first install the Heroku tool belt, then add the remote git location:

$ heroku git:remote -a veggietables-tcfj

You can pull a copy of the current live database with these commands ('make datasync' will also do this):

$ heroku pg:backups capture
$ curl -o latest.dump `heroku pg:backups public-url`
$ pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U robot_user -d robot_db latest.dump

Troubleshooting

Logs

Having trouble with logs not being generated for schedule chains?

• Check that ALL locations (also called donors) are valid. Often times this causes logs to not be created for current shifts/schedule chains being run.