Question

I’m currently using Pow to manage my Rails app, and have both .dev and .test running. I was wondering how to set up .test domain to use the test database instead of the development one.

Basically, can I have appname.dev with a development environment loaded, and appname.test with a test environment?

Answer 1

You might be able to use a variation of this Gist to determine the domain being accessed, and have the Rails app behave accordingly from then on.

You’d add a before_filter on your Application Controller that sets session[:site] according to whether it’s a development or testing environment (with the option to pass either site=development or site=testing from the standard Rails server as well).

Here’s what I think would be the relevant excerpt of the Gist linked above:

session[:site] = case request.domain
  when "appname.dev" then "development"
  when "appname.test" then "testing"
  else ENV['site'] || "development"
end

The rest of your Rails app would behave according to the value of session[:site]. I wrote a bit more about multi-site Rails apps here, as well.