STEEM Explorer Now Made Open Source

Good news, Steemians. STEEM Blockexplorer, found at https://explorer.steemliberator.com, is now open source.

What is STEEM Block Explorer

The STEEM Explorer is a Ruby on Rails repo that interacts with the STEEM blockchain to provide a frontend for searching via transaction hash, as well as viewing any users past 30 day post earnings.

By providing this code to the community, I hope to encourage users to learn STEEM programming. The more developers we have in the ecosystem, the better the products will be for every single user.

What is Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a very user friendly web framework that allows programmers to easily, and quickly, create very extensible applications. The framework makes use of the Model, View, Controller schema and makes receiving contributions to a single repo from many developers almost stress free. You should definitely read more at the Rails official site if you are interested.

Setting Up Dev Environment

Clone the repo
- git clone https://github.com/netuoso/steem-explorer
- cd steem-explorer
Install bundler and gems
- gem install bundler
- bundle install
Run the server
- rails server thin
Open site in browser
- http://localhost:3000

What to do Next

This part is entirely up to your imagination, but I will give a few different suggestions to maybe help you get started.

When you clone the repository, you should first follow the directions above to ensure all required dependencies are met. Next, using your favorite IDE or text editor, open the config/routes.rb file to get an idea of how the endpoints are configured. The routes will identify a particular controller or action for the endpoint.

Screen Shot 2017-11-04 at 12.16.08 PM.png

If you then open the app/controllers/pages_controller.rb file, you will be able to see how the actual controller methods are defined. The controller methods are referred to as the actions from the routes page.

Finally, the necessary HTML view files for this controller can be located in app/views/pages/. Here, you will find the files that you edit for the frontend displayed to the user. If you created a new action in the controller, you will need to also create the related view in the named folder, as well as add the new action to the routes file.