Question

I have two Rails 3 applications that will share portions of the same database through an internally developed gem. This is an internal project where we will always have full control over both applications. One application is bare metal administration (dev facing, potentially unstable) and another is the content publishing system (user facing, production). Its not practical nor desirable to meld the applications.

I’ve already seen Rails – Shared Database Tables between two apps

My proposed solution is to git submodule and share the /db directory of both applications.

I want to know if this is a valid approach, and if so are there any pitfalls I’m setting myself up for? If this isn’t valid what is a good alternative? (The goal here is to remain as simple as possible, no interprocess APIs.)

Answer 1

I have used this approach and it does work. If you are using capistrano for deployment enable submodule deployment like this

set :git_enable_submodules, 1

You have to be careful not to forget to sync the /db folder, before you start creating migrations, they are created with a timestamp and you can end up with the wrong sequence of migrations.