Rake task to create a Rails partial from json data

Question

Right now I have a helper:

def blog_posts
  Rails.cache.fetch("blog_posts", :expires_in => 30.minutes) do
    url = URI('http://www.xxxxxxxx.com/blog/?json=get_recent_posts')
    request = Net::HTTP.get(url)
    response = JSON.parse(request)
    response['posts'].take(4)
  end
rescue => e
  logger.error "Error retrieving blog posts!"
  logger.error "#{e.message}\n#{e.backtrace.join("\n")}"
  []
end

And the view I have:

<% blog_posts.each do |blog| %>
  <div class="col col-3">
    <a class="search-page-links" href="<%= blog['url'] %>" target="_blank">
      <img class="post-image" src="<%= blog['thumbnail'] %>">
      <br/><br/>
      <%= blog['title'].html_safe %>
    </a>
  </div>
<% end %>

Which works fine. Except we dont want the data to be pulled when the page loads at all anymore, because we cant always count on the source. The plan is to add a Rake task to the deploy process so that static data can be updated in a rails partial at each deploy, which would be rendered into the view. How could I go about doing this?

Answer 1

What I did

Rake Task:

namespace :blog do

  task :pull do
    tmp = "tmp/blog_posts"

    def fetch_blog_posts
      json = open('http://www.xxxxx.com/blog/?json=get_recent_posts').read
      hash = JSON.parse(json)
      hash['posts'].take(4)
    end

    def download_blog_images
      fetch_blog_posts.each_with_index do |blog, index|
        File.open("tmp/#{index}.jpg", 'wb') do |f|
          f.write open("#{blog['thumbnail']}").read
        end
        puts "Downloaded #{(index.to_i+1).ordinalize} Image" 
      end
    end

    def retrieve_blog_data
      puts 'Retrieving blog data from Wordpress'
      fetch_blog_posts

      File.open("tmp/blog_posts.json", "w+") do |f|
        f.write(JSON.pretty_generate(fetch_blog_posts))
        puts 'Saved json data'
      end
      download_blog_images
    end

    retrieve_blog_data
    puts 'Done retrieving blog posts'
  end

end

Helper:

module BlogHelper

  def blog_posts
    if Rails.env.development?
      json = open('http://xxxxx/blog/?json=get_recent_posts').read
    else
      json = File.read("tmp/blog_posts.json")
    end
    hash = JSON.parse(json)
    hash['posts'].take(4)
  end

end

Controller:

def home
  @blog_posts = blog_posts
end

View:

<% @blog_posts.each_with_index do |blog, index| %>
  # markup for each post...
<% end %>