Build an app idea generator with Rails and Nokogiri

I was trying to come up with an idea for an app until I thought “I wish there was an app that gave you to APIs to mash for a new app,” and that there was my new app idea. I was well aware of some lists of public APIs, but I wanted something more random. I wanted something that gave me a random pair for me to see if they’re a good match for a new app. On the other hand, I was always curious about Nokogiri, so I set up this small project to try it out. Click here to download the complete project or here for a deployed demo.

This project is pretty simple. It basically scrapes a list of public APIs to store them in the database at seed time, and then it’s just a matter of a single route that takes two of them for us to determine if they’re an useful match, so the bulk of this project lies on the seeds file.

Step 1: Build your rails app

We start the app by running rails new app-idea-generator -d postgresql. You can drop the postgresql switch and just default to SQLite3 if you just want to work locally and don’t intend to deploy to Heroku.

Then open your Gemfile and add the following lines at the end:

gem 'httparty'
gem 'nokogiri'
gem 'bootstrap'