National Parks Demo App

Prerequisites

• Ruby 3.4.7
• Bundler
• An API key from the national parks service

Under the hood

• Ruby 3.4.7
• Rails 8.0.3
• SQLite

Getting started

1. bundle install

• You know this one; install dependencies

2. Set NPS_API_KEY using your tool of choice
3. bin/rails db:prepare

• This will create and load your database
• hint: tail -f log/development.log to see what's going on

4. bin/rails server

• Congrats you're ready to receive requests

❯ curl 'localhost:3000/api/v1/parks?per_page=1' | jq '.'
[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "code": "abli",
    "name": "Abraham Lincoln Birthplace",
    "states": "KY",
    "properties": {},
    "created_at": "2025-10-08T09:26:00.202Z",
    "updated_at": "2025-10-08T09:26:00.202Z"
  }
]

Testing

bin/rspec

TODO

• What additional cols to add to parks model?
• Order results on index actions
• Enum on category for alerts
• index states for efficient search?
  • full text search in sqlite?
  • normalize state on a separate table?
  • With postgres I would use a states:array col and gin index