Question

I’m a simple guy— I just want a YAML config file that’s accessible from controllers. That’s all.

First, I created config/app_config.yml, which contains the config values I want. So far, so good.

Then, in I created lib/app_config.rb, which contains:

module AppConfig
  def self.config
    @@config ||= {}
  end

  def self.config=(config)
    @@config = config
  end
end

Finally, I created config/initializers/load_app_config.rb, which contains:

# the ./ is necessary for some reason, though no examples online use it...
require './lib/app_config'

AppConfig.config = YAML.load_file("#{Rails.root.to_s}/config/app_config.yml")

Should I skip load_app_config.rb altogether, and assign AppConfig.config some other way (perhaps inside of the module itself)?

It seems I’m making it too complicated..

Answer 1

You are making it a little more complicated than it needs to be. You only need 2 things:

Your conifg: /config/config.yml
(should look something like this, of course these are just placeholders)

development: &DEVELOPMENT
  host_name: "localhost:3000"
  api_username: [e-mail]
  api_pass: password
  api_key: 12345
test:
  <<: *DEVELOPMENT
cucumber:
  <<: *DEVELOPMENT
staging:
  host_name: "my-staging-staging.heroku.com"
  api_username: [e-mail]
  api_pass: password
  api_key: 12345
  s3:
    bucket: bucket-name
    access_key_id: secret_key_id
    secret_access_key: secret_key
production:
  host_name: "my-production.heroku.com"
  api_username: [e-mail]
  api_pass: password
  api_key: 12345
  s3:
    bucket: bucket-name
    access_key_id: secret_key_id
    secret_access_key: secret_key

Then your initializer: /config/initializers/app_config.rb

AppConfig = YAML.load(File.read(Rails.root + 'config' + 'config.yml'))[Rails.env].with_indifferent_access

Now you can access anything from you config from anywhere via AppConfig. For example to grab the host name in whatever environment you are in would be:

AppConfig[:host_name]

If we were running locally, that value would be “localhost:3000”