A Real Life Github Success Story

Github has been a real treasure for developers, and I've used it both at work and for personal projects. Until now, I haven't used it to its full effect, that is, contributing.

For MetalDetectr, I wanted to allow a user to filter the list to see releases from artists he had in his last.fm library. A quick search led me to this gem, only it wasn't as fully-featured as I needed.

So I forked it.

Github made this really easy to do. Soon I had the repository in my account, cloned it locally, checked out a new branch, and I was working.

The code was clean and certainly made my life easier to get what I wanted. There was a /method_categories folder that contained the methods to do API calls to get or create information for artists, tracks, and users. I wanted to read in a user's library of artists, so I simply modeled this after the other files.

class Lastfm
  module MethodCategory
    class Library < Base
      regular_method :get_artists, [:user], [[:limit, nil], [:page, nil]] do |response|
        response.xml['artists']['artist']
      end
    end
  end
end

This created a get request call for a last.fm user, set an optional limit on the number of fetched results, and set an optional page number to scan to. Along with the API key, these fields are outlined in the last.fm api docs.

Testing worked similarly. A spec file contained the other method tests, so adding the following, plus a fixture of the xml response, was super easy.

  describe '#library' do
    it 'should return an instance of Lastfm::Library' do
      @lastfm.library.should be_an_instance_of(Lastfm::MethodCategory::Library)
    end

    describe '#get_artists' do
      it 'should get the artists\' info' do
        @lastfm.should_receive(:request).with('library.getArtists', {
          :user => 'test',
          :limit => nil,
          :page => nil
        }).and_return(make_response('library_get_artists'))
        artists = @lastfm.library.get_artists('test')
        artists[1]['name'].should eql('Dark Castle')
        artists.size.should == 2
      end
    end
  end

After adding these methods, I pushed the branch to my github repository and sent a pull request to the original repository. Again, github makes this trivially easy. Before it was accepted, I had this line in the Metaldetectr Gemfile:

gem 'lastfm', :git => 'git://github.com/dbolson/ruby-lastfm.git', :branch => 'library_get_artists'

With the pull request accepted and my code merged into the master branch, it looked like this:

gem 'lastfm'

That's all it took to contribute to open source software.