optionalg / metacritic-4

Coding exercise - parsing metacritic website

metacritic

This repo is a coding exercise that consists of 2 parts.

• A parser for parsing the “Top Playstation 3 Games (By Metascore)” page (http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3). This is written in Ruby.
• A REST API for retrieving top PS3 games. This is written as a Sinatra web app. For development and demo purposes, this web app is backed by a sqlite DB.
• Demo: http://52.8.116.97:4567/api/v1/games

Known Issues

Requests to metacritic.com sometimes return with 403 status code (most likely to prevent crawlers from stealing data from their site). When this happens, the parser will print out an error message and simply exits. Try running it again.

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9.x or greater (tested with 1.9.3-p429 and 2.0.0-p353). Refer to rbenv or RVM for managing your Ruby installations.
• bundler gem installed (needed for dependency management)

sudo gem install bundler

• Install native dev packages for ruby, sqlite, libxslt and libxml2. For example, on Centos, you can run

sudo yum install ruby-devel
sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
sudo yum install sqlite-devel
sudo yum install libxml2-devel libxslt-devel

• On Ubuntu, you can run

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install ruby-dev
sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

• Install all Ruby gems dependency

bundle install

Running tests

• Tests are written as specs and stored under the spec directory.
• Tests can be run as followed

RACK_ENV=test rake test

Parsing the “Top Playstation 3 Games (By Metascore)” page

• You can either use the following Rake task

rake parse:top_ps3_games 

• Or you can invoke the parser directly

./parser top_games

Running the REST API

• To start the REST API, simply run the Sinatra app

ruby app.rb

• You can now access the REST API at localhost:4567/api/v1/games

Populating the database

To populate the database with the current top PS3 games, run the following Rake task

rake db:populate_top_ps3_games

For fun, you can also populate the DB with additional list of PS3 games by running

rake db:populate_sample_ps3_games

Using the REST API

• To view all games, make a GET request to /api/v1/games
• To view a particular game, make a GET request to /api/v1/games/GAME_TITLE_GOES_IN_HERE

Deploying to production

• I would recommend running the Sinatra web app on Puma behind nginx.
• For database, I would recommend using MongoDB.