DepotUk

A simple gem to pull the cinema and performances from the website of Depot, the independent cinema in Lewes, and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'depot_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install depot_uk

The gem conforms to the API set down in the cinebase gem, andycroll/cinebase, which provides a lot of useful base vocabulary and repetitive code for this series of cinema focussed gems.

Performance titles are sanitized as much as possible, removing the parent and baby, Knitflicks and See It First prefixes, the Cinecity suffix and opera and ballet labels. Royal Ballet and Opera, National Theatre Live and Exhibition on Screen series become the performance's event.

No token or setup is needed. The website runs WordPress with Jacro's plugin, and tickets are sold through Jacro's booking site.

Depot is one venue, so the gem holds it: the address from the website's travel page and the coordinates from OpenStreetMap. Its id is 'deplew', the Jacro code in the website's booking links. Cinema methods make no requests.

DepotUk::Cinema.all
#=> [<DepotUk::Cinema ...>]

cinema = DepotUk::Cinema.new('deplew')
#=> <DepotUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   'Pinwell Road',
  extended_address: nil,
  locality:         'Lewes',
  region:           'East Sussex',
  postal_code:      'BN7 2JS',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Independent'

cinema.name
#=> 'Depot'

cinema.latitude
#=> 50.8715417

cinema.url
#=> 'https://lewesdepot.org'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of showing dates, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days.

The website's calendar holds every advertised date, so any range takes five requests: the calendar, the home page for the full titles the calendar shortens, and the descriptive subtitles, relaxed and autism friendly access pages. A range with no performances takes one. The site is slow: expect about five seconds.

DepotUk::Performance.at('deplew', from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 2)
#=> [<DepotUk::Performance ...>, <DepotUk::Performance ...>, ...]

performance = DepotUk::Performance.at('deplew').first
#=> <DepotUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'Wicker' # from 'Parent & Baby ONLY: Wicker'

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title, e.g. 1990 for 'Misery (1990)'

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['baby', 'relaxed', 'subtitled']

performance.subtitled?
#=> true

performance.festival
#=> nil # e.g. #<data Cinebase::Festival name="Cinecity", year=2026>

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-11-02 11:00:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://lewesdepot.org/film/parent-baby-only-wicker/booknow/40631087'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Depot'

performance.cinema_id
#=> 'deplew'

Booking links are the website's own, to the page that holds Jacro's seat selection.

Only films are returned. Films play in the numbered screens, so the gem drops listings marked 'Depot event' or held in the studio: talks, workshops, courses and tastings.

Variants come from the access pages and from titles: subtitled (descriptive subtitles), relaxed (relaxed and autism friendly), baby (parent and baby), kids (CBeebies and sensory friendly), arts (Royal Ballet and Opera, National Theatre Live, Exhibition on Screen, musicals, plays and pantomimes) and q&a. Films subtitled from another language are not a variant.

bundle exec rake          # unit tests against fixtures
bundle exec rake live     # live lewesdepot.org

The fixtures in test/fixtures are the website's pages, trimmed to the parts the gem reads: a few calendar days, the home page's film list and the access pages' listings. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes those parts. The unit suite checks the fixtures against it and the live suite checks the real pages, held only in memory. When the website changes, update the shape first, then the fixtures.

Bump the version, merge, then run the Release Gem workflow in GitHub Actions. It runs the tests, tags the version and publishes the gem through RubyGems trusted publishing.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request