Adding Gravatar to your App

Created by Catherine Jones

Gravatar is a service for hosting user avatars. If you sign up with Gravatar you don’t need to upload your picture for a lot of services, as it automatically detects it from Gravatar.

Important

This guide assumes that you have already built a Rails Girls app by following this app development guide and added authentication using Devise.

You need to have an e-mail address registered with Gravatar for this to work. If you do not already have one you can go to gravatar.com.

1. Add the Gravtastic gem

Open up your gemfile and under your devise gem add

gem 'gravtastic'

In the terminal run

bundle install

This will install the gravtastic gem. Then remember to restart your rails server.

2. Set up Gravatar in your app

Open app/models/user.rb, and add these lines

include Gravtastic
gravtastic

right after the first line.

3. Configure Gravatar

Open app/views/layouts/application.html.erb and in the

<% if user_signed_in? %>

section but before the

<% else %>

add

<%= image_tag current_user.gravatar_url, :class => "gravatar" %>

And, put the following code to the bottom of app/assets/stylesheets/application.css:

.gravatar {
  height: 30px;
  width: auto;
}

Now open you app in your browser and login with an e-mail address that is associated with a Gravatar. You should be able to see your Gravatar.