Posted by Andy on Thursday, January 13, 2011.

The wonderful convenience of Earth

When I was whipping up Yaktrak I needed to get a (richly annotated) list of zip codes into the app. This is a familiar problem for web app developers: what’s the easiest way to get auxiliary data from canonical sources loaded and ready to use?

Lucky for me we have earth. Look at how easy this is:

$ rails new zippy

In the Gemfile:

gem 'earth'
gem 'fastercsv' # only if you're on Ruby 1.8

And in config/environment.rb or an initializer:

Earth.init :locality

Back at the shell:

$ bundle install
$ rails console
1.9.3-p0 :001 > ZipCode.run_data_miner!
   (7.2ms)  DROP TABLE "zip_codes"
Receiving schema
Schema:          0% |                                          | ETA:  --:--:--
Schema:        100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:01
Receiving indexes
Receiving data
1 tables, 200 records
zip_codes:     100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:09
Resetting sequences
[...it will also add some related tables...]
1.9.3-p0 :002 > ZipCode.find 53703
  ZipCode Load (22.4ms)  SELECT "zip_codes".* FROM "zip_codes" WHERE "zip_codes"."name" = ? LIMIT 1  [["name", 53703]]
 => #<ZipCode name: "53703", state_postal_abbreviation: "WI", description: "Madison", latitude: "43.078646", longitude: "-89.37727", egrid_subregion_abbreviation: "MROE", climate_division_name: "WI8">

Voila! Fresh from the transparent data crawlers at data.brighterplanet.com.

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