Solidus Feeds

A framework for producing and publishing feeds on Solidus.

Installation

Add solidus_feeds to your Gemfile:

gem 'solidus_feeds'

Bundle your dependencies and run the installation generator:

bin/rails generate solidus_feeds:install

Out of the box usage

Let's say that you want to generate a XML feed for products belonging to the Shoes taxon, consumable by Google Merchant compatible marketplaces and make it publicly available on your my-bucket S3 bucket at the path foo/bar.xml.

To register the feed you'd need to add the following code to an initializer such as config/initializers/solidus.rb or better yet config/initializers/solidus_feeds.rb

Rails.application.config.to_prepare do
  SolidusFeeds.config.register :google_merchant_shoes do |feed|
    taxon = Spree::Taxon.find_by(name: "Shoes")
    products = Spree::Product.available.in_taxon(taxon)

    feed.generator = SolidusFeeds::Generators::GoogleMerchant.new(products, host: Spree::Store.default.url)
    feed.publisher = SolidusFeeds::Publishers::S3.new(bucket: "my-bucket", object_key: "foo/bar.xml")
  end
end

Then make your Solidus app generate and publish the feed by calling the following line. It's recommended to call it in a background job, especially when generating feeds with large amounts of products.

SolidusFeeds.configuration.find(:google_merchant_shoes).publish

Having it in a background job makes it easier to:

• Launch it manually from the backend dashboard
• Make it refresh periodically via cron, sidekiq-scheduler, Heroku scheduler or similar
• Refresh the feed when receiving data from a webhook or after specific Solidus events

Serving the feed from the products controller (legacy)

We suggest to avoid this behaviour because it could be resource intensive, especially with a large number of products.

If you want to support the legacy behaviour of solidus_product_feed and publish a XML feed at /products.rss, you can add the following decorator:

# app/decorators/controllers/solidus_feeds/spree/products_controller.rb

module SolidusFeeds
  module Spree
    module ProductsControllerDecorator
      def self.prepended(klass)
        klass.respond_to :rss, only: :index
        klass.before_action :verify_requested_format!, only: :index
      end

      def index
        render as: :xml, body: load_feed_products if request.format.rss?
        super
      end

      private

      def load_feed_products
        @products = ::Spree::Product.all
        io = StringIO.new
        SolidusFeeds::Generators::GoogleMerchant
          .new(@products, host: 'https://example.com')
          .call(io)
        io.rewind
        io.read
      end

      ::Spree::ProductsController.prepend self
    end
  end
end

Publishing backends

S3

If you don't want to configure a S3 client each time, you can load your AWS config in an initializer:

# config/initializers/aws.rb

Aws.config[:profile] = 'my-profile'

Then config your S3 publisher specifying the bucket, object_key and an optional client if you need custom configuration on a per-publisher basis.

# config/initializers/solidus_feeds.rb

Rails.application.config.to_prepare do
  SolidusFeeds.config.register :all_products do |feed|
    feed.generator = SolidusFeeds::Generators::GoogleMerchant.new(
      Spree::Product.all,
      host: Spree::Store.default.url
    )
    feed.publisher = SolidusFeeds::Publishers::S3.new(
      bucket: "foo",
      object_key: "bar/my_feed.xml",
      client: Aws::S3::Client.new(…), # This is optional - use only if a custom config is needed
    )
  end
end
# visit https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/foo/bar/my_feed.xml

Static file

To publish the feed directly from an app directory (e.g. the public directory), you can use the Static File Publisher as such:

# config/initializers/solidus_feeds.rb

Rails.application.config.to_prepare do
  SolidusFeeds.config.register :all_products do |feed|
    feed.generator = SolidusFeeds::Generators::GoogleMerchant.new(
      Spree::Product.all,
      host: Spree::Store.default.url
    )
    feed.publisher = SolidusFeeds::Publishers::StaticFile.new(
      path: Rails.root.join('public/products.xml')
    )
  end
end

Builtin Marketplace format generators

• Google Merchant XML: compatible with Google Merchant and Facebook/Instagram feeds

Creating your own Generators and Publishers

Both the generator and the publisher are expected to respond to #call.

The publisher's #call method is expected to yield an IO-like object that responds to #<<.

Example

For example a simple feed that will publish recently added products to Rails' public folder in JSON format would look like this:

class FilePublisher < Struct.new(:path)
  def call
    File.open(path, 'w') do |file|
      yield file
    end
  end
end

class JsonProductFeed < Struct.new(:products)
  def call(io)
    products.find_each do |product|
      io << product.to_json
    end
  end
end

SolidusFeeds.register :recent_products do |feed|
  recent_products = Spree::Product.where(created_at: Time.now..2.weeks.ago)

  feed.generator = JsonProductFeed.new(recent_products)
  feed.publisher = FilePublisher.new(Rails.root.join("public/product.json")
end

Development

Testing the extension

First bundle your dependencies, then run bin/rake. bin/rake will default to building the dummy app if it does not exist, then it will run specs. The dummy app can be regenerated by using bin/rake extension:test_app.

bin/rake

To run Rubocop static code analysis run

bundle exec rubocop

When testing your application's integration with this extension you may use its factories. Simply add this require statement to your spec_helper:

require 'solidus_feeds/factories'

Running the sandbox

To run this extension in a sandboxed Solidus application, you can run bin/sandbox. The path for the sandbox app is ./sandbox and bin/rails will forward any Rails commands to sandbox/bin/rails.

Here's an example:

$ bin/rails server
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 6.0.2.1 application starting in development
* Listening on tcp://127.0.0.1:3000
Use Ctrl-C to stop

Updating the changelog

Before and after releases the changelog should be updated to reflect the up-to-date status of the project:

bin/rake changelog
git add CHANGELOG.md
git commit -m "Update the changelog"

Releasing new versions

Please refer to the dedicated page on Solidus wiki.

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Nebulab SRLs, released under the New BSD License.