Apple News

A fully featured gem for building Apple News documents and interfacing with the Apple News API.

Warning: a lot has changed with the Apple News API since this was last published. Use at your own risk.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'apple-news'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install apple-news

In order to work with the Apple News API, we have to set a couple of configuration params that are available from News Publisher.

AppleNews.config.channel_id = "63aFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF"
AppleNews.config.api_key_id = "379FFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF"
AppleNews.config.api_key_secret = "miJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA="

You can fetch the Channel information by calling:

channel = AppleNews.config.channel

If working with multiple channels:

config = AppleNews::Configuration.new(
  channel_id:     '...',
  api_key_id:     '...',
  api_key_secret: '...'
)
channel = config.channel

You can either fetch sections by their ID, or by fetching all of them through the Channel object.

section = AppleNews::Section.new(section_id)

# or
channel = AppleNews.config.channel
channel.default_section # for the default section
channel.sections # for all the sections

You can fetch articles either by their ID, their channel, or their section.

article = AppleNews::Article.new(article_id)

# or
channel = AppleNews.config.channel
channel.articles # all articles in the channel
channel.default_section.articles # all articles in the default section

The 10 most recent articles are returned by default. To change the number or sort order, you can pass any of the query params defined in the API docs. For example:

# first 5 articles
channel.articles(sortDir: 'ASC', pageSize: 5)

A "Read Article" API request will be made for each article to ensure that #document exists (the search endpoint only returns read-only attributes). If you don't need to access the document, you can opt-out of this behavior via:

channel.articles(hydrate: false)

Apple News articles are submitted as "bundles", with the article content and attached files together in one request. Because of this, we have the concept of a Document. The Document is what contains the actual article content in the Apple News JSON format. The Article encapsulates this and also includes all of the files that will be submitted along with the document.

Documents are built using the AppleNews::Document class. All documents must have an identifier (a string generated by you to determine article uniqueness, not the ID returned from the Apple News API), title, layout, components, and a default component text style.

In order to maintain idiomatic Ruby, all properties are accessed/set via the underscore version of the actual Apple News API property. For example, componentTextStyles becomes component_text_styles.

document = AppleNews::Document.new
document.identifier = "1234"
document.title = "Test Article"
document.layout = AppleNews::Layout.new(columns: 1, width: 1024)
document.component_text_styles[:default] = AppleNews::Style::ComponentText.new(
  font_name: 'Georgia',
  font_size: 14,
  text_color: '#000000'
)

document.components << AppleNews::Component::Heading.new(text: "Test Article")
document.components << AppleNews::Component::Body.new(text: "Just testing out this Ruby gem!")

Every component, style, property, etc. as defined by the API documentation has its own class. Each property can be set either by the constructor, or by calling the accessor method on the object. For example:

AppleNews::Component::Instagram.new(url: 'https://www.instagram.com/p/BB7mr0hsS4U/')

# or

component = AppleNews::Component::Instagram.new
component.url = "https://www.instagram.com/p/BB7mr0hsS4U/"

An article must have a document. Once it's created, you can add files to the article bundle.

article = AppleNews::Article.new(nil, document: document)
article.is_preview = true

# There are 3 different ways you can add a file to the document
article.add_file(File.new("/path/to/image.jpg"))
article.add_file_at_path("/path/to/image.jpg")
article.add_string_as_file("image.jpg", image_contents, "image/jpeg")

Once you have your document built, you can submit it to the API.

article.save!

It will return true if saving succeeds, otherwise it will return an array of errors as provided by the API.

Updating an article works the same as creating an article.

article = AppleNews::Article.new("25c4666a-26d9-48c0-88c1-d8c84fa94ecd")
article.document.title = "New Title!"
article.is_preview = false
article.save!

You can easily delete articles once they're fetched.

article = AppleNews::Article.new("25c4666a-26d9-48c0-88c1-d8c84fa94ecd")
article.delete!

This will return true when successful, otherwise it will return an array of errors as provided by the API.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/hodinkee/apple-news-rb.