Show Me The Food

A Code for Atlanta civic app that maps SNAP/EBT retailers and Atlanta tax-digest parcels on an interactive map, built with Ruby on Rails, geocoder, and Leaflet/OpenStreetMap.

Goal

Identify food deserts and areas only serviced by convenience stores, sourcing data from government sources such as EBT programs and tax digests. Data is contained in CSV files in db/seed_data (see Datasources.txt), which is normalized and seeded into the database. Eventually we'd like to be able to use the app to canvas these areas in person, so that data is updatable from user input and locations can have notes/comments/pictures/etc.

The ultimate goal is to be able to use this data to effectively campaign grocery stores and healthy food providers to locate in "food deserts."

Requirements

• Ruby (see .ruby-version)
• No database server needed — the app uses SQLite. To use PostgreSQL instead, swap sqlite3 for pg in the Gemfile and update config/database.yml.

Setup

With Docker (no Ruby install needed)

docker compose up

This builds the dev image, prepares and seeds the SQLite database, and serves the app at http://localhost:3000. The source tree is bind-mounted, so code edits reload live. The database lives in a named Docker volume; to reset it, run docker compose down --volumes.

Natively

With Ruby installed (see .ruby-version):

bin/setup

This installs gems, prepares the SQLite database, seeds it from the CSVs, and starts the server. Already set up? Seed and run with:

bin/rails db:prepare db:seed
bin/rails server

The SNAP/EBT retailer data ships with coordinates. The Atlanta Strategic Community Investment parcels only have street addresses; geocode them (throttled to 1 request/second per Nominatim's usage policy — the 245 rows take about 4 minutes) with:

bin/rails geocode:backfill

Deploying to Fly.io

The production Dockerfile plus fly.toml deploy to Fly.io with SQLite on a persistent volume. With flyctl installed and signed in:

fly launch --copy-config --no-deploy
fly secrets set RAILS_MASTER_KEY=$(cat config/master.key)
fly deploy --ha=false

--ha=false keeps the app to a single machine — required because SQLite lives on one volume. First boot creates, migrates, and seeds the database automatically; then optionally geocode the parcel data with fly ssh console -C "bin/rails geocode:backfill".

Tests and checks

bundle exec rspec
bin/rubocop
bin/brakeman

CI (GitHub Actions) runs all three plus bundler-audit and importmap audit on every push and pull request, and Dependabot keeps dependencies current.

History

Originally built at Code for Atlanta hack nights in 2014 on Rails 4.1 with Google Maps (gmaps4rails). Rebuilt in 2026 on Rails 8 with Leaflet and OpenStreetMap — no API key required. The seed CSVs are 2013–2014 snapshots; refreshing them from current USDA sources (e.g. the Food Access Research Atlas and SNAP Retailer Locator) would be a great next contribution.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.