Configuring a Rails Application

There are a lot to consider when configuring a Rails application, such as variables organization, environments, security credentials, etc. Among so many different ways to do that I’m going to show my preferred way using what Rails has to offer with config_for.

Organization

Rails has a helper method to load a configuration file and it’s very easy to use it: config_for:

module MyRailsApp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.github = config_for(:github)
  end
end

This way there’s no need to keep just one application.yml configuration file with all that the application needs. That’s why I group configurations by some external dependency or by some specific subject.

Format

In short, my preferred format is yml, such as in this example:

default: &default
  api_url: https://api.github.com
  client_id: my-public-client-id
  client_secret: <%= ENV['GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET'] %>

development:
  <<: *default

test:
  <<: *default

production:
  <<: *default
  client_id: my-public-client-id-for-production

Environments

In that example the configuration file config/github.yml use the environments as root keys. This way the default values are set in the development key and all environments inherit from development. Also we can redefine environment specific values as, in this case, client_id for staging.

Locally the project developers should adopt a common pattern of configuration as url/user/pass. However if this is not an option by any reason I would fetch the value with a default one, such as:

database:
  user: <%= ENV['DB_USER'] || 'admin' %>

Credentials

The main goal is to never publish a credential by obviously security reasons. That’s why we use environment variables and then this kind of configuration goes to Heroku dashboard or inside /etc/environment file.

Locally I like to use the gem dotenv always taking care to never commit a private secret. I usually install dotenv this way:

echo "gem 'dotenv-rails', groups: [:development, :test]" >> Gemfile;
bundle;
touch .env{,.sample};
echo ".env" >> .gitignore;

Configurations Usage

In order to use the configurations you just access Rails.configuration:

url = Rails.configuration.github['api_url']

Conclusion

The usage of Rails config_for simplifies the organization of application configuration. Then all variables are hold into specific files and you never will use an environment variable inside the code anymore.

Additionally, the usage of .env.sample and the gem dotenv helps a new developer to find out what’s needed to configure locally for starting to work on the project.

Finally we can discard to add more dependencies to the project such as figaro or settingslogic because they just try to solve the same problems and then let the project with less dependencies.