Question

Theoretical question. Lets say I build an application for managing clients, products, bills and such. All without a user login.

Is it possible to get multi user (each one with his own clients,products,…) functionality after the main application is done?
Or should I think of the multi user in the first place? How flexible is rails at this part?

thanks in advance
dennym

Answer 1

What you are asking for is a pattern called Multitenant. There are different ways to do it, but none are provided by Rails natively.

You could start with this slide: http://www.slideshare.net/tardate/multitenancy-with-rails

And figure out if you want to do; partitioning based on data, Rbac, model or schema.

There are is one that offers it as a service that says that it is easy to do after you have your application: http://railskits.com/saas/

But in our experience, it was a bit outdated and missing some features that we wanted.

You can also take a look at other gems like: multitenant or act_as_tenant.

We ended up using act_as_tenant and doing it from the beginning.