VueUk

A simple gem to pull cinemas and performances from the API behind the Vue cinemas website and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'vue_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install vue_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 language versions, years, screening dates and festival prefixes.

No token or setup is needed. The API answers uncached requests only within the guest session the website starts for every visitor, so the gem starts one with POST /api/microservice/auth/token and sends its cookies, starting a fresh one once if the API rejects it.

Only UK cinemas are returned; Vue's euro-priced cinemas are left out. The API has no addresses, so the first call to an address method reads the cinema's page on myvue.com.

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

cinema = VueUk::Cinema.new(10051)
#=> <VueUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   'The Viaduct',
  extended_address: 'Hyndburn Road',
  locality:         'Accrington',
  region:           nil,
  postal_code:      'BB5 1QF',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Vue'

cinema.full_name
#=> 'Vue Accrington'

cinema.id
#=> '10051'

cinema.url
#=> 'https://www.myvue.com/cinema/accrington'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of showing dates, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days. It makes one request for all of the cinema's advertised dates and keeps those in the range.

VueUk::Performance.at(10051, from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 2)
#=> [<VueUk::Performance ...>, <VueUk::Performance ...>, ...]

performance = VueUk::Performance.at(10051).first
#=> <VueUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'Clayface'

performance.language
#=> 'English' # Vue tags English audio too

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title, e.g. 2026 for 'Street Fighter (2026)'

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['audio_described']

performance.subtitled?
#=> false

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

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-10-23 16:00:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://www.myvue.com/book-tickets/summary/10051/HO00020288/139988'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Accrington'

performance.cinema_id
#=> '10051'

Variants are arts, audio_described, autism_friendly, kids and subtitled.

bundle exec rake          # unit tests against fixtures
bundle exec rake live     # live myvue.com

Fixtures in test/fixtures are hand-written: invented films and addresses in the shape of Vue's responses, never recorded output. 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