Introducing environmentalist: an intuitive, environment-focused config structure for your rails applications
Monday, August 4th, 2008 by John TrupianoA couple of months ago, I wrote an article (Better setup for environments in rails) discussing the standard set of changes we make to the config structure of each of our rails apps.
The primary motivation for me to make these changes stemmed from the need to have several deployable environments. The standard set of rails environments (development, test, production) simply just don’t cut it for me. It’s important for us to be able to deploy to staging, demo and even production-test environments. When including server configurations (e.g. a Passenger config snippet, or a mongrel_cluster config snippet), I’ve often had to use unique configurations for each deployable environment. Consequently, my config/ directory quickly became polluted with files such as: apache_prod.conf, apache_staging.conf, apache_demo.conf. Furthermore, it also requires special care when deployment comes around.