postie

Postie is a Sinatra based rack middleware that can be dropped into any rack or rails application. Postie provides Auspost (Australia Post) postcode information via a json interface.

Drop it into your application and happily use your favourite javascript library to work out what the postcode for the suburb your user just typed in.

Code quality

It's a bit rough but it works. Patches are welcome.

Sinatra or Rack applications

require 'postie'
use Postie::Application

Rails applications

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'boot')

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.gem 'postie', :lib => 'postie'

  config.middleware.use 'Postie::Application'
end

API

Drop in postie then navigate to /postcode for full API reference.

• /postcode/3000 Lists any localities that have said postcode
• /postcode/states Lists the states available
• /postcode/state/:name Lists the postcodes available for each state
• /postcode/suburbs Lists the suburbs available
• /postcode/suburb/:name Returns the postcode information for matching suburbs (substring search)

Data source

Postie data comes from Auspost, I haven't even read the terms of use, thats just how thug I am. There is a rake task (rake db:import) that will download the latest database from auspost and import it to the database.

Thanks

• Pat Allan, I stole his postie idea that was originally a Rails app, then a Merb app. I took one more progression and made it even smaller (Sinatra / Rack)
• Ben Askins, for the db:import / FasterCSV task
• dsturnbull, for updating the db import tasks to pull directly from auspost

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2009 Ben Schwarz. See LICENSE for details.