Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3 and I would like to have a “central place” where to definitely set the SSL certificate to use inside my application.

Almost everywhere in code I have HTTPS requests like this

e = Typhoeus::Request.get("https://example.com/action",
  :ssl_cacert => "ca_file.cer",
  :ssl_cert => "acert.crt",
  :ssl_key => "akey.key",
  [...]
end

So, in order to specify a SSL certificate for all my request, I would like to set a global variable (I heard that global variable can be dangerous…) or something like that in a safe way.

Answer 1

You could build a SSL helper class, and use that (I’d put it in lib, but that’s mostly just user preference):

class MySSL
    SSL_DEFAULTS = {
        :ssl_cacert => 'ca_cert.cer',
        :ssl_cery => 'acert.crt',
        :ssl_key => 'akey.key'
    }

    def self.get(uri, options = {})
        options.reverse_merge!(SSL_DEFAULTS)
        Typhoeus::Request.get(uri, options)
    end

    # And so forth for post, etc.
end

Where reverse_merge! is a convenient Rails extension to give default options for a hash (if the original hash has those keys already, they won’t be overwritten). You avoid setting a global variable, too, by using a class constant. And in the rest of your code, you’re able to call

MySSL.get('https://example.com/action')

or

MySSL.get('https://example.com/action', :other => :options)

which are a lot cleaner, in comparison.

Hope this helps!