Ruby Gem

A versatile mobile device detection gem

A Ruby port of a lightweight PHP class for detecting mobile devices. It uses the User-Agent string combined with specific HTTP headers to detect the mobile environment.

History of the PHP library

The first version of the script was developed by Victor Stanciu in 2010. In December 2011, Serban Ghita updated the first version and fixed all the bugs, then launched the 2.0 version which marks a new mindset and also featuring tablet detection.

Throughout 2012, the script has been updated constantly and we have received tons of feedback and requests. In July 2012 we moved from Google Code to GitHub.com in order to quickly accommodate the frequent updates and to involve more people.

How reliable is this script? How frequent do you update it? How?

The script is as reliable as server-side detection can be. This is not a replacement for RWD (media queries) or other forms of client-side detection. Read W3C's Mobile Web Application Best Practices Prefer Server-Side Detection Where Possible section.

In order to detect phones and tablets (new ones and legacy) we're testing the library against HTTP headers and User-Agents that we find on the internet and through the demo.php file (See: http://is.gd/mobiletest). Sometimes is hard to distinguish between a phone and a tablet, this is why we're constantly researching a lot of mobile vendors sites, checking product codes and new releases. You can see some of our 'tests' by checking the test folder.

We are working on a database and API that will automate this process in the near future.

Roadmap and future development. Contribute!

PHP library roadmap

Usage

Require the gem in your Gemfile:

gem 'Mobile_Detect'

Create an instance where you need it. It reads in a reasonably large JSON file, so it's probably best to put this in an initialiser if you're using Rails:

detect = Mobile_Detect::Detect.new

Use it to

ua = request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]
isTablet = detect.isTablet?(ua)
isMobile = detect.isMobile?(ua)

If you want to get more specific details about a particular user agent:

device = detect.device_type(ua)
puts device["type"]     # mobile,tablet,desktop
puts device["categories"] # more granular grouping, eg. tablet:iPad, mobile:iPhone, mobile:LG, mobile:iPhone:Chrome

The category can be a comma-separated list of categories. Note: The categories groupings and names are not guaranteed to be the same in future versions and are intended as a guide, although for common devices such as iPhone and iPad it is expected to remain the consistent.

Using the library in analytics

As a helper for visitor data analytics there is a script which can process CSV file data and add additional columns with device detection data.

This may become a more abstracted class in future versions

$ check_csv --help
Usage: check_csv [options]

Options:
    -i, --input [file]               Input CSV file (default: usage_data.csv)
    -c, --column [column]            Useragent column (zero-based) (default: 1)
    -o, --output [file]              Output CSV file (default: processed_usage_data.csv)
    -f, --overwrite                  Force overwriting of output file if it exists

    -v, --verbose                    Print verbose output
    -h, --help                       Display this screen