Book Image

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

By : Vladimir Dementyev
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

4.7 (3)
By: Vladimir Dementyev

Overview of this book

Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework for building web applications from scratch while focusing on productivity, leveraging the power of the convention-over-configuration principle, and the well-defined model-view-controller pattern, assisting the developers in building useful features. However, this initial simplicity often leads to uncontrollable complexity turning the well-structured codebase into a hardly maintainable mess. This book aims to help you keep the code maintainable while working on a Rails application. You’ll start by exploring the framework capabilities and principles, allowing you to reap the full potential of Rails. Then, you’ll tackle many common design problems by discovering useful patterns and abstraction layers. By implementing abstraction and dividing the application into manageable modules, you’ll be able to concentrate on specific parts of the app development without getting overwhelmed by the entire codebase. This strategy also encourages code reuse, simplifying the process of adding new features and enhancing the application's capabilities. Additionally, you’ll explore further steps in scaling Rails codebase, such as service extractions. By the end of this book, you’ll be a code design specialist with a deep understanding of the Rails framework principles.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring Rails and Its Abstractions
7
Part 2: Extracting Layers from Models
11
Part 3: Essential Layers for Rails Applications
17
Index
18
Gems and Patterns

Configuration sources and types

Modern web applications rely on dozens of configuration parameters. The more your application grows and matures, the harder it is to deal with API keys, encryption secrets, and other settings. Instead, you need to think about where to store them securely, how to share them with the team, how to rotate values, and last but not least, how to inject them into the application and access them throughout the code base. The code aspects of managing configuration are what we talk about in this chapter.

Let’s start with an overview of the configuration providers available in Ruby on Rails.

Files, secrets, credentials, and more

Every Rails application comes with a config/ folder. What can you find there? The actual contents depend on the chosen Rails components and third-party libraries, but the following three are likely to present:

  • Ruby configuration files (application.rb and environment/*.rb)
  • A database configuration file (database...