SameShirtEveryDay.com

I’ve signed up for Facebook today to check out how the whole application development works. Setting up a development server at home which is accessible from Facebook is pretty straight forward.

Here’s what you need:

1. Facebook account
2. Local box with Apache
3. Domain name pointing to your home IP. I use No-Ip.

Here are the steps I took.

1. Setting up development application on Facebook. Follow the guide, it’s pretty straight forward.
2. Set up No-Ip to point *.dev.mydomain.com to my local box. This allows me to create as many Rails applications as I need to.
3. Configured Apache to forward all calls to fbtest.dev.mydomain.com to localhost:3000 using mod_proxy like so:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName fbtest.dev.mydomain.com
     ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
   </VirtualHost>

4. gem install rfacebook
5. cd /anywhere/fbtest
6. rails .
7. ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rfacebook/plugins/rfacebook_on_rails
8. rake facebook:setup
9. Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
10. Copy and paste API key and secret to config/facebook.yml. Set canvas_path to the local path on Facebook, ie /myfacebookapp/ and callback_path to local path on your server, ie /facebook/.
11. ruby script/generate controller facebook index
12. Edit index method in Facebook controller, like so:

    class FacebookController < ApplicationController
      def index
        @result = fbsession.friends_get.uid_list
      end
    end

13. Edit index.rhtml like so:

    <% @result.each do |uid| %>
      <fb:name uid="<%= uid %>" />
    <% end %>

14. Start Apache
15. ruby script/server
16. Now you should be able to hit your Facebook application page at http://apps.facebook.com/myfacebookapp

You should see a list of your friends. Took me about 30 minutes to figure all this out.