Punching Bag

Punching Bag is a hit tracking plugin for Ruby on Rails that specializes in simple trending.

Features

• Total hit count
• Hit counts for the last day, week, month, etc.
• Simple trending based on most hits in the last day, week, month, etc.
• Rake task to group old hit records for better performance
• ActsAsTaggableOn integration for trending tags/topics support
• Voight-Kampff integration for bot checking

Requirements

• An existing Rails app
• Ruby >= 1.9

Installation

In your Gemfile add:

gem "punching_bag"

In the terminal run:

bundle install
rails g punching_bag
rake db:migrate

In your model add:

acts_as_punchable

Usage

Tracking hits in your controller

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @post.punch(request)
  end
end

Getting a total hit count in your view

@post.hits

Getting a hit count for a time period in your view

@post.hits(1.week.ago)

Getting a list of the five all-time most hit posts

Post.most_hit

Getting a list of the 10 most hit posts for the last 24 hours

Post.most_hit(1.day.ago, 10)  # limit is 5 by default, pass nil for no limits

Sorting posts based on all time hit count

Post.sort_by_popularity('DESC')   # DESC by default, can also use ASC

Getting a hit count on a tag for the last month

tag.hits(1.month.ago)

Getting a list of the 10 most hit tags in the last week

ActsAsTaggableOn::Tag.most_hit(1.month.ago, 10)

Compressing old hit records to improve performance
The default settings combine records by day if they're older than 7 days, by month if they're older than 1 month and by year if they're older than 1 year

rake punching_bag:combine

Compressing old hit records using custom settings
This time we'll combine records by day if they're older than 14 days, by month if they're older than 3 months and by year if they're older than 2 years

rake punching_bag:combine[14,3,2]

Notes

• The punching_bag:combine rake tasks is not run automatically. You'll have to run it manually or add it as a cron job.
• The punching_bag:combine rake task can take a while depending on how many records need to be combined.
• Passing the request object to the punch method is optional but without it requests from bots, crawlers and spiders will be tracked.
• See the Voight-Kampff documentation if you'd like to customize the list of user-agents considered bots.
• The tag related features will only work if you have ActsAsTaggableOn installed and enabled on the same models as Punching Bag.