Small gem to work with the list of current astronauts in space from http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'current_astronauts'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install current_astronauts

require the gem, and optionally include the module for simplicity

require 'current_astronauts'

include CurrentAstronauts

Instantiate an object and fetch data. If success?, use the data as desired.

a = Astronauts.new
a.fetch
if a.success?
  # do something here
end

The URL source defaults to http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json, but if you set ENV['OPEN_NOTIFY_URL'] before instantiating the object, it will use the set URL instead.

ENV['OPEN_NOTIFY_URL']
a = Astronauts.new

a.data contains the full data as returned in a hash. There are methods to work with smaller portions of the data.

How many astronauts are currently in space?

puts "there are currently #{a.num} astronauts currently in space."

Use the 'people' method to work with the list of astronauts and their associated craft. It is an array of hashes.

people = a.people
first = a.people.first

puts "a.people returns a list of people and their associated craft as an #{people.class} of type #{first.class}."
puts
puts "#{first['name']} is currently on: #{first['craft']}."

Print a formatted list of astronauts and their associated craft.

a.print

Formatted list appears as follows.

Name              | Craft
------------------|-------------
Anatoly Ivanishin | ISS
Takuya Onishi     | ISS
Kate Rubins       | ISS
Jing Haipeng      | Shenzhou 11
Chen Dong         | Shenzhou 11
Sergey Rizhikov   | ISS
Andrey Borisenko  | ISS
Shane Kimbrough   | ISS

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. 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/hortoncd/current_astronauts.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.