Question

I have two tasks both using rails:

1. To make an inventory app to help employees keep track of inventory
2. To make a website for the company for customers to visit and gain a bit of knowledge about our product

My plan is to have the inventory app for each branch of the company to have a domain like this:

branch1.example.com
branch2.example.com
branch3.example.com

and for the customer-facing website to simply be http://www.example.com

My question is, should I make two separate rails apps, one for the inventory app and one for the customer-facing website? Or would it be easier to manage the two as a single combined app? The two apps would not be likely to share much code.

And if I were to split my apps, how would I be able to host both of my apps using a single domain as seen above (with the use of subdomains) with heroku?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, there’s not really one right answer, but being experience with rails, I would recommend one app.

If you split there will be many times you’ll have to copy and paste common code (becomes unmanagable). Plus you’ll deal with either a shared database or multiple databases.

Not splitting, you can use a wildcard domain and access the current subdomain via request.subdomain to easily do whatever logic needs to happen per subdomain. Also you will only need to create the Product model once.

In short, all the mentioned requirements sound tightly coupled enough that one app would be easiest.