Configoro — Environment-specific configuration data for Rails apps

About

Pretty much every Rails app out there needs to store environment-specific configuration data: API URLs, Memcache settings, AWS keys, etc. The “quick fix” approach is usually to dump this information in, e.g., development.rb as constants, like MAILCHIMP_API_URL. This creates cluttered and unorganized environment files.

Configoro creates a configuration object that can be accessed as both a hash and struct. It stores common configuration data merged with environment-specific data.

The data is read from YAML files stored alongside the environment files.

Installation

To use this gem, simply add

gem 'configoro'

to your Gemfile, then run

rails generate configoro

to install some default configuration files. Edit these new files with your configuration data.

Usage

Assume your application namespace is MyApp (which is what it would be if you had created your Rails project using rails new my_app). You can find your namespace in your config/application.rb file.

In this case, you would access your configuration using the MyApp::Configuration object. You can access it as an indifferent hash

MyApp::Configuration[:mailchimp_api_url]
MyApp::Configuration['mailchimp_api_url']

or as a struct.

MyApp::Configuration.mailchimp_api_url

If you include any hashes in your configuration YAML files, they will also be accessible as indifferent hashes or structs:

MyApp::Configuration.memcache.timeout
MyApp::Configuration[:memcache]['timeout']
MyApp::Configuration['memcache'].timeout

Configuration Files

Configuration is stored within the config/environments directory of your Rails app. Files ending in “.yml” are loaded from the common/ subdirectory and a subdirectory named after the current environment.

Each file goes into its own hash in the configuration. For example, if you placed a file called memcache.yml within config/environments/development, you would be able to access your Memcache timeout using MyApp::Configuration.memcache.timeout.

Custom Configuration Locations

If you need to do your own configuration loading, you can do so using the Configoro::Hash#<< method. For example, you could place the following in a Ruby file under config/initializers:

MyApp::Configuration << "path/to/additional/yaml_file.yml"
MyApp::Configuration << { 'additional' => 'configuration' }

MyApp::Configuration.additional #=> 'configuration'

Note that if you pass a path to a YAML file, a key will be created to store the contents of the file, named after the file name. If the key already exists, the new values will be deep-merged into the existing values.

In the example above, the data in the yaml_file.yml file can be accessed using MyApp::Configuration.yaml_file.