#336 Copycopter

Mar 27, 2012 | 6 minutes | Views, Tools, Plugins

Copycopter provides a nice interface that clients can use to edit the text in a Rails application. Learn how to deploy a Copycopter server using Heroku and integrate it in a Rails application through I18n.

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bashcoder over 12 years ago

Looks like the client has decent caching, and co-processes that keep it up-to-date. Cool!

Will Leinweber over 12 years ago

Great screencast as always.

However you should not check configuration, especially secrets, into code.

CopycopterClient.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = ENV['COPYCOPTER_KEY']
  config.host = ENV['COPYCOPTER_HOST']
end

$ heroku config:add COPYCOPTER_KEY=8df4bc164dd COPYCOPTER_HOST=strong-dawn-1901.herokuapp.com

LiquidMark over 12 years ago

Will, Thanks for sharing this. It's great to learn useful things in the comments section of Ryan's awesome site, too!

Celso de Sá over 11 years ago

Benjamin Benoudis about 10 years ago

Michael Madison over 12 years ago

Does this link mean anything? Says they are shutting it down.

joonas over 12 years ago

Ryan mentioned in the screencast that it used to be a paid service, but since thoughtbot decided to shut it down, they have open sourced it for everyone to use, hence this episode.

So you can still use it, as shown by Ryan, you just have to host it yourself (for better or worse).

I would recommend reading the post over at the thoughtbot blog as well.

As a side note, if copycopter isn't enough for you, Locale is also worth checking out.

Patrick Robertson over 12 years ago

It is being actively maintained by two former clients of Thoughtbot that heavily use Copycopter going forward.

kobaltz over 12 years ago

Copycopter will be shutting down on April 15. It's a shame to see useful features die. I'm sure that they had good reasons, unlike they're like Google with Google Wave or Fox with any awesome show that died after 1/2 - 1 season.

Patrick Robertson over 12 years ago

The service lives on as an OSS project. It takes roughly 10-15 minutes to get an existing application fully working on the heroku cedar stack. The code lives on here: https://github.com/copycopter

Rorsvort over 12 years ago

Any plan to convert this into a mountable engine? I still found it a hassle that it has to make a call for each page request.

Patrick Robertson over 12 years ago

There are some plans to make it a mountable engine.

Fabian Becker over 12 years ago

Where does it store the data? Does it override internationalization files?

Balazs Nagy over 12 years ago

It doesn't override the files themselves, but those will be used as defaults. All of your locale data will go into copycopter database. You can remove your original files then, and/or you even replace them with a version extracted from the current copycopter database. This means by time you can even shut down your copycopter server.

memoht over 12 years ago

Copycopter allows clients to edit text on a site without a developer. Shutting down your copycopter server would be no different from just editing all the text yourself to begin with. In my case, I will probably be the only person who uses Copycopter, but even just playing with it has helped me finally get a better grip on locales and I18n in my Rails apps.

Rob Carter over 12 years ago

I tried using this with an app that has Active Admin. Doesn't want to play nice. Gives the error "undefined method `downcase' for nil:NilClass". When I take out Active Admin, it works fine. Anyone else run into this?

Patrick Robertson over 12 years ago

Please submit an issue on on the copycopter gem!

https://github.com/copycopter/copycopter-ruby-client/issues

Christopher Dell over 12 years ago

Might want to take a look at Locale which provides a lot of Copycopter's functionality, but has a more I18n-oriented approach.

Being an external serivce, there is very little setup needed to get it in to production.

bashcoder over 12 years ago

Thanks for posting about this. Tried it out tonight - good stuff.

mbrookes over 12 years ago

Whilst I appreciate Ryan has a bigger audience than thoughtbot (otherwise CopyCopter might not be shutting down as a paid service), this screencast is almost a word for word copy of the one Dan Croak did here a couple of days ago: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/19388751626/copycopter-is-now-open-source

Not saying that's good or bad, it just feels "off" somehow (not as off as Christopher Dell's ad for his competing product, but you know what I mean).

Gitlab Ltd over 12 years ago

We are using tolk, simple plugin, works well after tweaking: https://github.com/dhh/tolk

Damon Aw over 12 years ago

It seems that Copycopter is officially shutting down on 15th April and the service will not live on in any way.

https://copycopter.com/pages/shut-down

Sad.

Ryan Smith over 12 years ago

As I understand it, just the paid service is shutting down...but you can still use the product the paid service is based on copycopter-server but you have to host it yourself now, that's all.

This screen cast shows you how to do that.

So no worries if you still want to use it.

Patrick Robertson over 12 years ago

Copycopter lives on as an OSS Project! The code lives here:
https://github.com/copycopter

phrase over 12 years ago

Maybe phrase would be a good replacement for the shut down copycopter.
We are currently in beta for our i18n service application: phrase

If you have a rails/ruby project that uses the i18n gem, this could be the right thing for you to use.

And since we are on Railscasts, we have a screencast, too ;-)

railyboy over 12 years ago

Can you run your application which is using CopyCopter client on Heroku as well, so that your client(s) can edit the app in the cloud? Or does the client app have to be locally hosted?

Is there somewhere that there is information on this?

I ask as I'm looking at working in a remote team for a piece of OSS work, and this would provide a quick mechanism for the development team to receive client feedback.

P.S. Another great screencast Ryan. Keep them coming.
P.P.S I'm trying to use Cucumber with sorcery and a screencast on using Cukes with authentication from scratch would be great in my opinion as must Cuke tutorials assume you are already logged in and have been authenticated.

nate daily over 12 years ago

I am using it now with a few apps that are hosted on Heroku. But, I notice memory issues with those apps when I update the copy.

Qihuan Piao about 12 years ago

Notice if you deploy to heroku now, you'll receive a mail said "The database contains 24,706 rows, exceeding the plan limit of 10,000"...

Nick almost 12 years ago

Is there a way to update yml files in config/locales/ automatically? So updated translations will get saved and cached later.

Jeffrey Horn about 11 years ago

I'd like to know this as well. It's not clear without diving into the source whether there will be serious issues if the copycopter server goes down.

Benjamin Benoudis about 10 years ago

I don't like this approach and prefere to use Mercury Editor which you've showed in this railscast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/296-mercury-editor

Shilpa Malhotra over 7 years ago

One of the best stuff to gather amazing article which I need to explore more. Thanks a lot sir.

Ruchi Batra over 7 years ago

Thanks for your post! it contains quite a lot of things to learn! it's great that I known this site!