FBPAC API

This repository is no longer maintained and exists for archival purposes only.

For a more recent project on this topic, see Ad Observer.

See archival README information.

A Ruby API for the Facebook Political Ad Collector site.

First, this will mirror most of the admin-facing functions of the Rust API, then adding new stuff more nimbly to respond to what we want to present to partners and readers.

It's structured to be a drop-in replacement for some pieces of the Rust API... and to run alongside it. (The Rust API will continue to catch the ads and to serve static assets.)

Installation Instructions

0. You should have the Rust app installed and running.
1. Clone this repo.
2. bundle install in the root of this repo.
3. Run rake db:migrate just to be sure we have all the changes we need. (Unless you have a post-4/4/2018 DB dump).
4. bundle exec rails s
5. Visit http://localhost:3000/fbpac-api/ads -- you should see a big pile of JSON.
6. Visit http://localhost:3000/fbpac-api/ads/by_advertisers -- you should see a log in page.
7. Create a user for yourself, locally, by running this in rails c. User.create!({:email => "[email protected]", :password => "111111", :password_confirmation => "111111" }).
8. Try http://localhost:3000/fbpac-api/ads/by_advertisers again, log in, then you should see more JSON.

Testing / comparison with the Rust API

rake test runs the tests. Be sure to write new ones for new features!

How to create new users:

Unlike the Rust API, we have real user accounts with a unique password per account. When a partner signs up, log into the production console with RAILS_ENV=production rails c and create them a user account with User.create!({:email => "[email protected]", :password => "111111", :password_confirmation => "111111" }). Then they should be good to go.