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Ruby-Austria/treasure_hunt

Location-based treasure hunt platform for conferences — Rails 8.1 PWA, GPS clues, teams, hints, live leaderboards. Built for RubyConf Austria 2026, open-sourced for any organizer.

View on GitHub ↗https://hunt.rubyconf.at ↗
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Created Oct 1, 2026Updated Oct 1, 2026

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README

Treasure Hunt

A location-based treasure hunt platform for conferences, built with Rails 8.1. Originally created for RubyConf Austria 2026, where attendees explored Vienna solving GPS-verified clues, and now open source so any conference organizer can run their own hunt.

Live instance: hunt.rubyconf.at — the original RubyConf Austria deployment, kept online as a reference.

Players walk the city with their phones: each clue unlocks when they get close to the real location. Teams, hints on cooldowns, live leaderboards, a real-world treasure endgame — all as an installable progressive web app that keeps working on shaky venue WiFi.

For conference organizers

You don't need to be a Rails developer to run this. The short version:

  1. Clone and configure. Edit config/conference.yml — event name, city, dates, theme color, logo. That's the whole rebrand.

  2. Create your hunts. Deploy, log in as admin, and build hunts and clues in the admin UI — or write them as seed files.

  3. Learn from a real example. examples/rubyconf-austria/ contains the two actual hunts that ran in Vienna (35 stops across the city, hand-validated coordinates and radii, hints tuned over weeks of playtesting). Read it to see what a good hunt looks like, or load it to try the app:

    bin/rails runner examples/rubyconf-austria/seeds.rb

  4. Deploy. Pick your platform:

    • Railway — railway.toml included; create a project from this repo, add a PostgreSQL plugin, done.
    • Kamal — config/deploy.yml included for any VPS with Docker.

    Player traffic at a conference is a few hundred phones — a small box is plenty.

Design guidance

Writing good clues is the hard part, and it's not a code problem. See db/data/hunts_draft.md and db/data/vienna_locations.md for the working notes behind the Vienna hunts, including the hint policy (never name the place in a hint) and how radii were tuned per landmark.

Features

  • GPS treasure hunts — sequential clue solving with proximity-based verification
  • Team play — form teams, share progress, claim treasure together
  • Hint system — reveal hints with cooldown timers
  • Temperature feedback — cold / closer / warm / hot proximity indicators
  • Live leaderboard — per-hunt rankings
  • Treasure endgame — solve all clues to reveal a real-world treasure location
  • Admin UI — manage hunts, clues, locations, and attendees without touching code
  • Installable PWA — home-screen app with offline support via service worker

Tech stack

  • Backend: Ruby 3.4 / Rails 8.1 / PostgreSQL
  • Frontend: Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) / Tailwind CSS
  • Infra: Docker + Kamal or Railway, Solid Queue/Cache/Cable
  • CI: GitHub Actions

Development

bin/setup                 # install deps, create db, seed
bin/rails runner examples/rubyconf-austria/seeds.rb   # load the example hunts
bin/dev                   # run the app (Procfile.dev)
bin/rails test            # test suite

Default admin login after seeding: admin@treasurehunt.io / admin123456 (override with ADMIN_PASSWORD, change immediately in production).

Credentials: a placeholder config/credentials.yml.enc ships with a local config/master.key (gitignored). Regenerate before production with EDITOR="nano" bin/rails credentials:edit.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome. If you ran a hunt at your conference, tell us about it — and consider contributing your hunt as another example under examples/.

License

MIT. Originally built by Muhamed Isabegovic for RubyConf Austria 2026.