I often need friendship modeling for projects so I created a generator to get up and running quickly. This is a simple generator for creating a Self-Referential Association for a friendship model. Heavily based on Ryan Bates rails cast #163 with some help from this guy on github. It isn't particularly sophisticated or polished and doesn't include any tests so use at your own risk.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'bfriend'

And then execute:

bundle

Or install it yourself as:

gem install bfriend

Run the bfriend generator rails g bfriend. This will generate a friendship model, a migration, add routes & associations to your user model and generate a friendship controller suitable for use in an API.

If you are using the gem for a ruby on rails project, run rails g bfriend --ror .

Edit the migration to give the status a default of false

t.boolean :accepted, default: false" 

Run your migration

Now you can:

request friendship:          Friendship.create( user_id: id, friend_id: id )
accept friendship:           Friendship.update( status: true )
decline friendship:          Friendship.delete
end friendship:              Friendship.delete
all friends:                 user.friends
all requests:                user.pending
friend_requests:             user.pending_friends
requested_friends:           user.requested_friends
friendship by user:          user.current_friends
friendship by friend:        user.bfriended_friends

At this time no view templates are created and I will update this readme when and if I add them.

The class methods have been moved to the bfriend module of the gem so you will need to remove them from your user model and add include Bfriend

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/XFinger/bfriend.

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