ScottUk

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

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'scott_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install scott_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 years, festival suffixes, the parent and baby suffix and the film society prefix, and naming National Theatre Live and Royal Ballet and Opera screenings in full.

No token or setup is needed. Scott Cinemas publishes a JSON feed of each venue's listings, documented at https://www.scottcinemas.co.uk/api. Tickets are sold through TapOS, behind each venue's own booking pages.

The website keeps the chosen cinema in a cookie and has no plain list of venues, so the gem holds them: names, addresses and feed codes from the website's cinema and API pages, and coordinates from its cinema finder. Cinema methods make no requests. The four WTW cinemas in Cornwall, which share the website's cinema menu, run a separate site and are not included.

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

cinema = ScottUk::Cinema.new('SCOBWR')
#=> <ScottUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   'Northgate Yard',
  extended_address: 'Mount Street',
  locality:         'Bridgwater',
  region:           'Somerset',
  postal_code:      'TA6 3FQ',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Scott Cinemas'

cinema.full_name
#=> 'Scott Cinemas Bridgwater'

cinema.id
#=> 'SCOBWR'

cinema.latitude
#=> 51.12985

cinema.url
#=> 'https://bridgwater.scottcinemas.co.uk'

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

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

performance = ScottUk::Performance.at('SCOBWR').first
#=> <ScottUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'Ghosts: The Possession of Button House' # from '... (Parent and Baby Only Show)'

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title, e.g. 1975 for 'Barry Lyndon (1975)'

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['baby']

performance.subtitled?
#=> false

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

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-11-04 11:00:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://bridgwater.scottcinemas.co.uk/book-now/ghosts-the-possession-parent-baby/76429'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Bridgwater'

performance.cinema_id
#=> 'SCOBWR'

Booking links are the feed's own, to the venue's booking page, which holds the TapOS seat selection.

Variants come from the feed's flags and fields: arts (event cinema: theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, music, art and television), baby, relaxed (autism friendly), senior (Silver Screen) and subtitled. Most screenings offer audio description, so it is not a variant. Strobe warnings, ticket offers and premium screens are not variants either.

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

The fixture in test/fixtures is Bridgwater's feed, trimmed to a few dates with shortened descriptions. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes the fields the gem reads. The unit suite checks the fixture against it and the live suite checks every venue's real feed, held only in memory. When the feed changes, update the shape first, then the fixture.

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