--- title: Import dev.to articles to Orbit with Ruby slug: import-dev-to-articles-to-orbit-with-ruby published_at: 2022-07-29 14:00:12 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:26 +0000 summary: description: Code: https://gist.github.com/cjavdev/64108e6aa25673255487fd4b20563e7d tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, orbit, orbit.love, api, orbit api, dev.to, dev.to api, dev.to articles, import dev.to articles to orbit, web development] views: 273 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/import-dev-to-articles-to-orbit-with-ruby youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_gknmGj9wM youtube_id: R_gknmGj9wM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/R_gknmGj9wM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R_gknmGj9wM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Import dev.to articles to Orbit with Ruby *Published: July 29, 2022* *Views: 273* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_gknmGj9wM) [![Import dev.to articles to Orbit with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R_gknmGj9wM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_gknmGj9wM) ## Description Code: https://gist.github.com/cjavdev/64108e6aa25673255487fd4b20563e7d ## Transcript what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about how you can use the orbit api and the dev.2 api and we're going to write a little bit of ruby code to take our blog posts or articles that are being posted on dev.2 and ingest them into orbit as activities so if you're not familiar with orbit it's sort of like a crm for developers it's a really interesting way to sort of track activities that um you might want to engage with a certain community or interact with certain developers that are in a certain space so it's kind of like a crm that's specialized for developers and for developer community and then dev.2 is this platform where you can write blog posts and what i want to do is import those activities from the blog post into dev into orbit as sort of like actions that a developer has taken so let's walk through that process there's no there are many many official uh integrations that orbit supports but the ingestion of um articles is from dev.2 is not one of them so we're going to make a new workspace name we'll call it demo dev2 and we're going to say create workspace this creates a workspace inside of orbit that we're going to use just for this demo now we can hook up a bunch of different integrations one of them is um i don't know this says like ring the bell i guess that'll say notify me when it's ready but it's not officially ready so what we're going to do is build one from scratch and so we can go to the api tokens section and we can create a new api token this is going to be i don't know our demo api token for actually it's going to be like dev.2 importer the name that you use here is important because that's going to show up in some parts of the ui so we'll look at our dev.2 importer i'm going to copy the api token for orbit and then let's just make a new directory called dev2 or like orbit dev2 and we'll cd into orbit uh dev2 and i'm going to say bundle init to start a new a brand new gem file i'm going to say bundle add rest client because i'm going to use the raw ruby rest client gem i'm also going to add buy bug in case we need to do any debugging and there might be other stuff that we need to add later but i'm also going to create a new file we're just going to call it run.rb and in here i oh you know what else we want is probably the load from dot n so let's say bundle add dot end and let's create a dot n file where we're going to say orbit secret is the secret that we just copied okay the next thing we're going to do is open up our run.rb and say require dot n load that's going to open up our end file and load it let's also require rest client and let's start implementing a little bit of how we might interact with orbit and dev.2. so some it's going to be something like this we're going to say you know fetch the articles from dev.2 and then we want to um for each article uh create a new activity inside orbit so i guess the other part of this is that we need to go over to dev2 we're going to go to our account settings and then under extensions we can scroll down and there is an area where we can generate an api key so we're going to say let's see extensions api generate api key so we're going to call this one demo and i'm going to say generate key we're going to open this up copy the key there and come back over to our end file or end file we're going to say this is our dev two secret okay the other thing we're gonna need for orbit that i forgot about is our workspace so in the very beginning recall that we created a workspace this is gonna be the name of our workspace it's sort of like the slug in the url there so demo dev.2 so i'm going to put that in the end file also okay so fetch the articles from dev.2. so that's going to be like the first step that we need to to create so i i'm just going to do some like fantasy driven development here and just imagine that i had a dev2 client i don't think there is an official one there might be a ruby client but it's really tricky to search for um and so i'm just going to say client is dev dev2.new and i'm gonna pass in and um i don't know dev to secret so that's gonna be how we sort of initialize the client and then we'll say something like client articles dot each do article or something and then for each article what we want to do is like create a new activity inside of orbit so in order to make this part work we need to go build a client for dev2 so i'm going to add a new ruby file here called dev2.rb and i'm going to create a new class called dev2 that is initialized with the api key we're going to store that in an uh instance variable and we're probably gonna want like a base url um i don't remember what that is let's take a look at the dev2 um dev.2 developer api um for so like dev.2 is actually just like the domain but it's really built by forum so we need to find the dev2 here we go how to use the dev2 api um okay so right yeah so you can just you can just use like dev2 api let's see if this gives us documentation or anything yeah okay so dev2 um so here let's say we want to fetch the articles we want to uh list published articles so this is going to be our base urls dev2 api so we're going to come back over here we're going to add our base url and then let's make a method here called articles that's going to take in some params and what we're going to do is call get which again is fantasy driven get is going to take in a path and params and get is going to go to slash articles with params and get is just going to call restclient.get url param or url yeah just give me the url and then we'll use params to build up a query string for a url so here we'll say base url and that concatenated with the path and we'll drop on the query string at the end so params.2 query i think two query might come from active support um so that we're gonna get a response back from rest client and then we'll probably want to return json.parse the response.body um so yeah for now what we could do is like use our spec and do some testing whatever but i'm going to be super lazy here and just say like um pry require dot slash i don't know dev two and then say dev2 dot new test or and then that's going to give us a client so c equals underscore c dot articles undefined method two query for hash is it two it might be two param to param um reload uh okay require okay there is no okay so i think what we need to do is import um require active support all bundle add active support active support just has so many helpful things from rails but you don't need all of rails if you're running just like a simple little ruby script like this so let's exit again open up pry require dot slash dev2 c is dev2 dot new test cd articles and uninitialized rest client okay so we need to move this to dev2 uh exit there's probably a better way to do this actually there is okay so what i'm going to do is just add like a little test harness thing down here so we're just going to say client is dev2.new test client articles so then we can say ruby ruby dev2 and okay so it didn't spit anything out but i'm guessing we're going to have some sort of error or exception oh wow we didn't even need an api key for this okay so that's cool so um all right so then in that case yeah i guess we don't even need an api key that's fine um but that gives us back the articles so that's great and we could even like iterate over them or we could say articles first and that should give us the first article and it does okay so we have the the type of the post and it's an article it has the id it has a title description etc so we're going to take this data and we're going to use it to make a request over to orbit to create an activity so here we need to like create the activity it turns out there is a ruby gem for orbit activities and it's called like orbit ruby orbit activities uh okay so let's add this gem orbit activities so we're going to say bundle add orbit activities yeah i guess if we're not creating any articles that would make sense that we don't actually need um that ruby or that we don't need an api key so we're going to say require orbit activities and here there is an example activity for creating a new activity right here so we're going to say orbit activities request dot new and the api key is going to be end orbit secret and the workspace id this is going to be our end orbit workspace it's going to be a new activity and then the body of the activity ends up being some data that we're going to send and it's based on the api reference for orbit so orbit dot love slash reference oh it's docs dot orbit dot love slash reference it'd be cool if orbit dot love reference just automatically redirected to this okay so activities this is what we want to do we want to create a custom or content activity for a new or existing member so if you already know what the member's id or the member's slug is inside of orbit then you can create a custom or content activity for a specific member but if you don't know what like the details of the member you can just pass in your workspace slug and then create a content active activity passing in details about the member and that will like sort of associate with an existing member based on their name github handle twitter handle email linkedin etc etc so we're able to kind of like back into what the right member is we need to pass in the url and occurred at activity type and then yeah details about the member so if we went over here and grab our workspace slug and then come back to the api ref that's what's going to go here and in fact that okay so we've already got that and then the body the body is going to look like this so we're going to have the url okay let's just start constructing the body um here so we're going to say url is something occurred at is something and then we have the member which is going to have some stuff and then there is the activity type activity type which is content and then details of the member we have what else do we have we have the bio birthday company title location name we will have name um what else do we have we maybe want to add some tags so we can say tags to add might be something like dev2 author or something like that so that we can look up all of the dev2 authors we might plop in their github twitter github twitter if we have their email we would put their email and we have their dev2 name and then we also want to put in some information about the identity for where we like learned about this person's information and profile so we're gonna say identity and this is gonna have the name of the person again the source which is gonna be dev2 and we might also have things like their username their username uid username et cetera so we don't actually have the uid or anything so if we look back at this at this article what do we get from this article we have we do have a user key here and that user has a name has a username it also has the twitter username and github username it also does have the website url so um let's start going through and adding this so we're going to have like article url occurred at is going to be article published at the member's name is going to be article user name github is going to be article user github i think it's github username let's see yeah github username and i think twitter is going to be the same except this part turns to twitter and dev2 is article user username this one is going to be the same name and this is going to be username all right so that should this should actually make the request to create a new article so let's just put some little logging here puts like uh uploading um new article to dev2 or to orbit uh and then maybe we'll put like articles title or something and that should give us a little bit of output about what's going on and yeah okay so we're going to say ruby run and just see what happens uninitialize constant dev2 so we're going to require dot slash dev2 oh the other thing is we don't want all the articles we just want specific articles so we want to pass in some params here so username cjav dev let's only try to find my own like my own articles at least initially okay cool so we got uh this this output it said uploading new article to orbit this is like a recent our articles that i wrote but then we get this message down below that says undefined method bytesize for hash and it's somewhere inside of that orbit activities thing and it turns out that this body here like the content that we send to it needs to be a string so i'm going to say to json so if we say ruby run again then now we see uploading new article uploading new article so now if we head over to our workspace our orbit workspace we can go to members should show me and look at that okay so now my dev2 content is populating inside of orbit so that is how we can wire that up now you might take this little ruby script and wire it up inside of github actions or something to run maybe run it once a week so that just sort of like ingests all of your articles but uh yeah i thought it was kind of like a fun little exercise in connecting these two apis orbit does have a csv upload but i couldn't figure out how to make it work with the content article type specifically so um yeah hopefully this was useful this is a pretty common little task where you might want to like you take data from one api put it into some other api they don't have a default integration so you might just wire up a quick ruby script and let it let it let it run um obviously like i had a few swags at this when i was first testing it out so hopefully i helped you avoid any of those issues and yeah this is this is uh like really fun ways to use ruby to script out little sort of automated tasks thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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