ierail

Irish Rail API Ruby Wrapper

I wrote most of this on the train, as is appropriate.

It's a trivial wrapper for the Irish Rail real time (whut?) train times system, in Ruby. It uses the HTTP GET API that was thankfully supplied along with the more interesting SOAP API, so a tiddly simple set up with RestClient and Nokogiri (two of my favourite things ever) to pull and process the XML data into Hashes for great value.

Usage

Grab the IERail gem

$ gem install ierail

require 'ierail'

ir = IERail.new

Find all Southbound trains serving Clongriffin station

trains = ir.southbound_from('clongriffin')

Find all trains serving Clongriffin in the next 30 minutes

trains = ir.station_times('clongriffin', 30)

trains.each { |t| p t.inspect }

Find all Northbound trains serving Clongriffin before / after a certain time

trains = ir.northbound_from('clongriffin').after('HH:MM')
trains = ir.northbound_from('clongriffin').before('HH:MM')

NB: "HH:MM" must be soon, as the API, by default, returns upcoming arrivals

Find all Southbound trains from Malahide in the next N minutes

trains = ir.southbound_from('malahide').in(N)

Find out information for a specific train

trains = ir.station_times('clongriffin', 60)

trains.first.last_location # "Arrived Harmonstown"

trains.first.origin # {:name=>"Greystones", :time=>2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100}

trains.first.destination # {:name=>"Malahide", :time=>2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100}

trains.first.arrival # {:scheduled=>2013-05-13 22:09:00 +0100, :expected=>2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100}

trains.first.departure # {:scheduled=>2013-05-13 22:09:00 +0100, :expected=>2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100}

trains.first.duein # "2"

trains.first.late? # 0 || 1

Find out the movements of a specific train

trains = ir.station_times('clongriffin', 60)

train_code = trains.first.code

train_movements = ir.train_movements(train_code) # Gets the movements of the train for today
train_movements = ir.train_movements(train_code, date) # Gets the movements of train for some date

fourth_stop = train_movements.at(4)

fourth_stop.location #{:code => "GRGD", :location_full_name => "Clongriffin", :stop_number => 4, :location_type => "S"}

fourth_stop.arrival # {:scheduled=>2013-05-13 22:09:00 +0100, :expected=>2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100, :actual=2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100}

fourth_stop.departure # {:scheduled=>2013-05-13 22:09:00 +0100, :expected=>2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100, :actual=2013-05-13 22:10:00 +0100}

fourth_stop.train #{:code => "E808", :date => 2013-05-13 22:09:00 +0100, :origin => "Malahide"}

Check the main.rb for additional usage.

Development

Testing

Rather than having the test suite hit the API, this project is using VCR alongside Timecop to use stubbed responses.
These responses are stored in the fixtures/vcr_cassettes directory and can be updated by running

1. rm -r fixtures
2. rake test

As the API functionality is highly time dependent, Timecop is used to set/freeze time so that we can run time based queries on the older fixture data.

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Pull requests welcome, because there's damn all in it at the moment. Please accompany the pull request with an appropriate test, and if you can, an example here in the README.