GftUk

A simple gem to pull the cinema and its performances from the Glasgow Film Theatre website and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'gft_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install gft_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.

No token or setup is needed. The website is a single page app on Indy Systems, the Indy Cinema Group's platform. It reads its listings from a GraphQL API at /graphql, which answers consumer queries that send the headers Client-Type: consumer and Site-Id: 103. The gem asks the same API.

Glasgow Film Theatre has one venue, keyed by its Indy site id, 103. The website gives no address or coordinates, so the gem holds them, from OpenStreetMap. Cinema methods make no requests.

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

cinema = GftUk::Cinema.new('103')
#=> <GftUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   '12 Rose Street',
  extended_address: nil,
  locality:         'Glasgow',
  region:           nil,
  postal_code:      'G3 6RB',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Independent'

cinema.name
#=> 'Glasgow Film Theatre'

cinema.id
#=> '103'

cinema.latitude
#=> 55.8657225

cinema.url
#=> 'https://www.glasgowfilm.org'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of showing dates, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days. The API lists the dates with showings in one request. The gem then asks for ten of those dates at a time, as aliased showingsForDate queries in one request. A year ahead is about six requests.

GftUk::Performance.at('103', from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 365)
#=> [<GftUk::Performance ...>, <GftUk::Performance ...>, ...]

performance = GftUk::Performance.at('103', from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 365).first
#=> <GftUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'The Money Maker' # from 'FFF: The Money Maker + Q&A'

performance.film_year
#=> 2026

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['q&a', 'subtitled']

performance.subtitled?
#=> true

performance.festival
#=> #<data Cinebase::Festival name="French Film Festival", year=2026>

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-11-21 17:00:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://www.glasgowfilm.org/checkout/showing/fff-the-money-maker-qa/500092/'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Glasgow Film Theatre'

performance.cinema_id
#=> '103'

Booking links open the website's ticket step for the showing. Sold out screenings, with no seats remaining, are listed with no booking link.

Only films are listed. Showings that are unpublished or private, festival passes such as 'Scotland Loves Anime 2026 Weekend Pass', workshops, and title classes for live events, talks, television and education are dropped. Event cinema, such as National Theatre Live, is kept.

Variants come from each showing's badges and from titles: audio_described, subtitled (subtitled, captioned and deaf friendly screenings), relaxed (autism and dementia friendly), kids (the Take 2 children's strand), q&a, 35mm, 70mm and arts (event cinema). 4K, introductions, previews and BSL interpretation are not variants.

Festivals come from badges (French Film Festival, Glasgow Film Festival, GYFF, SLA, SMHAF) and from the FFF: title prefix. Film years come from a year in the title, or else the film's release date.

Titles are cleaned up:

• Festival and strand prefixes go: 'FFF:', 'Take 2:', 'Take 2 Access:', 'Access Film Club:', 'Movie Memories:', 'Youth Screening:' and 'Preview:'.
• Anniversaries, restorations and prints go: 'Marie Antoinette - 20th Anniversary - 4K', 'Short Cuts - 35mm', 'A Silent Voice (10th Anniversary)'.
• Add-ons go: '+ Q&A', '+ discussion', '+ introduction'.
• Series prefixes such as 'NT Live:' go, and the performance's event names the series, here National Theatre Live.

bundle exec rake                # unit tests against fixtures
LIVE=1 bundle exec rake live    # live glasgowfilm.org

The fixtures in test/fixtures are GraphQL responses: every advertised date, and a few films on some of those dates. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes the fields the gem reads. The unit suite checks the fixtures against it and the live suite checks real responses, held only in memory. When the API 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