Peter Marklund's Home

The PeepCode Code Review PDF has some nice advice about how best to deal with configuration parameters in your Rails applications. Traditionally most of us have probably just stuck global Ruby constants in our environment.rb files, but there are more structured ways of doing it. I've started using the app_config plugin and it seems to work fine so far. To make sure I haven't forgotten to define a parameter in an environment I access my parameters via a custom config_param method:

# Method to supplement the app_config plugin. I want to crash early and be alerted if
# I have forgotten to define a parameter in an environment.
def config_param(name)
  AppConfig.param(name) do
    raise("No app_config param '#{name}' defined in environment #{RAILS_ENV}, " +
      "please define it in config/environments/#{RAILS_ENV}.rb and restart the server")
  end
end