The Wonsys Blog

If you’re spreading constants around your environments files to configure your Rails apps based on the environment it is running on, stop immediately! Let’s say it’s not very wise… ;)
There’s no point in having lots of different constants all around your code that basically all do the same thing: configure your app.

Instead, you should do something similar to what Geoffrey Grosenbach suggests in Rails Code Review — BTW, we translated that PDF in Italian: have a YAML file in your config directory where you store all of the settings for your app grouped by environment.

I said you should do something similar, because what Geoffrey suggests is just a starting point and that solution can be made a tad more elegant.
Which is what our new plugin is about!

ConfigurationManager allows you to have a single YAML file where you can store all of your settings, then setup a single constant which can be used all over your app by doing something like ConstantName.setting_name; or even ConstantName.group_of_settings.setting_name.

The YAML file should be placed in config/configuration_manager.yml and it should contain your settings like this:

everyone: &every_env
  key1: value1
  inner_hash:
    key2: value2

development: &non_production_env
  <<: *every_env
  key3: value3

test:
  <<: *non_production_env

production:
  <<: *every_env
  key4: value4

Then in your environment.rb you put the following:

MyConfig = ConfigurationManager.new_manager

Which will allow you to access your settings wherever you need them:

MyConfig.inner_hash.key2 #=> value2
MyConfig.key4 #=> value4
etc...

I hope you get the idea…it should make sense. :)

Development of the plugin is on Github, but you can install it from our usual Google Code repository:

script/plugin install http://wonsys.googlecode.com/svn/plugins/configuration_manager/

If you find any bugs, please let us know using our bug tracker.

This post was written by Michele 5 months, 3 weeks ago on May 29th, 2008 mid-afternoon.
Tags: dev, plugin, Rails, ruby.