Question

I’m working with a Ruby Gem that access a public API via a configurable URL. I want to have a default value built into the gem, but the ability to override that as a configuration or runtime option inside a Rails 3 app that uses the gem. What’s the best way to do that?

Answer 1

You can expose the configuration value as a class-level property. For example, if you were developing MyConfigurableGem, you could have

def self.my_database_preference=
  #set override some default. 
end

And if your user was working with a rails app, you could suggest there be a file app/config/configurable_gem_override.rb with the following

MyConfigurableGem.my_database_preference = "sqlite3" 

Does that answer your question?