MoviehouseUk

A simple gem to pull cinemas and performances from the Movie House website and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'moviehouse_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install moviehouse_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 Event: prefix, years and festival prefixes, and naming National Theatre Live and Royal Ballet and Opera screenings in full.

No token or setup is needed. Movie House's website runs on Admit One's A1Web, and cinebase's shared Cinebase::A1web support reads it. Each venue has its own path, such as https://moviehouse.co.uk/coleraine, and sets its A1Web site code on that page.

The venue list is cached for an hour. Reading it takes one request for the home page and one for each venue's page. The website has no addresses or coordinates, so the gem holds them: addresses from the Food Standards Agency's food hygiene ratings and coordinates from OpenStreetMap.

MoviehouseUk::Cinema.all
#=> [<MoviehouseUk::Cinema ...>, <MoviehouseUk::Cinema ...>, ...]

cinema = MoviehouseUk::Cinema.new('MH_COLE')
#=> <MoviehouseUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   '1 Riverside Park South',
  extended_address: nil,
  locality:         'Coleraine',
  region:           'County Londonderry',
  postal_code:      'BT51 3RT',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Movie House'

cinema.full_name
#=> 'Movie House Coleraine'

cinema.id
#=> 'MH_COLE'

cinema.latitude
#=> 55.1198699

cinema.url
#=> 'https://moviehouse.co.uk/coleraine'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of showing dates, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days. The venue's what's on page holds every advertised date, so any range is one request.

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

performance = MoviehouseUk::Performance.at('MH_COLE').first
#=> <MoviehouseUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'National Theatre Live: Golden Boy' # from 'Event: NTL Golden Boy'

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title, e.g. 1981 for 'The Evil Dead (1981)'

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['arts']

performance.subtitled?
#=> false

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-11-05 19:00:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://moviehousecoleraine.admit-one.co.uk/tickets/?perfCode=90975'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Coleraine'

performance.cinema_id
#=> 'MH_COLE'

Booking links go to the venue's Admit One ticketing site, which redirects to seat selection for the performance. The website's own booking links only work in a browser that has just visited the venue's pages.

Variants are arts (recorded theatre, opera, ballet and other events), kids (My First Movie screenings for young children) and subtitled.

bundle exec rake          # unit tests against fixtures
bundle exec rake live     # live moviehouse.co.uk

Fixtures in test/fixtures are pages captured from moviehouse.co.uk: the home page, each venue's page trimmed to its head, and the Coleraine what's on page trimmed to a few films on a few dates. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes the parts of the pages the gem reads. The unit suite checks the fixtures against it and the live suite checks real responses, 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