Where can I store site-wide variables in Rails 4? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am new to Rails and come from a ColdFusion background, where we would store global / site-wide variables in the 'application' scope. This persists the variable across any view or controller. Does Rails 4 have an equivalent functionality for this type of thing?
The site-wide variable won't typically change often so it doesn't need protecting in any way.
For example, in my situation, I want to store the website's domain name. One for testing and one for live environments. Localhost for development and xxxxxx.com for production.
Any tips or pointers would help. I have Googled this extensively and solutions seem to be far too complicated to achieve what seems to be such a trivial task. What's the best elegant solution for Rails 4?

Answer 1

The simplest, basic and default way is to use the Rails.application.config store.
Rails.application.config.my_config = 'foo'
You can assign a config in your environment:
# application.rb
module MyApp
class Application < Rails::Application
config.my_config = 'foo'
end
end
and read it with
Rails.application.config.my_config
# => 'foo'
This approach works well for very simple applications, but if you want something more advanced there are several gems available.
I'm currently using SimpleConfig. The main advantages are:
per-environment configuration. You can configure default configurations for the application, then override defaults with environment specific configurations
local.rb file for custom overrides
capistrano-like configuration style
it works nicely with the dotenv gem, very useful to avoid storing sensitive credentials in your repo.

Answer 2

This sounds like a perfect example for configuration values stored in config/environments/production.rb and config/environments/development.rb. Just store any value there:
config.my_special_value = 'val'
And access it in your application like this:
Rails.application.config.my_special_value
Always the value of your environment is active.
If you just want to have a „global“ value, store it in your application controller. All your view controllers are derived from your app controller, so you can save any value there as an instance or class variable:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
MY_CONSTANT_VALUE = "foo"
end
class MyViewController < ApplicationController
def index
raise MY_CONSTANT_VALUE.inspect
end
end
You also could implement an helper:
# app/helpers/application_helper.rb
module ApplicationHelper
FOO = "bar"
end
# app/controllers/foo_controller.rb
class FooController < ApplicationController
def index
raise FOO
end
end

Answer 3

I can recommend good method to store variable. I use this on production
Passwords can be stored easier to .env file
like this
#Root dir create file ".env"
PASSWORD=123456
and load password
#Somewhere in app
ENV['PASSWORD'] #=> 123456
it works I hope will help you

Answer 4

You can use gem figaro
write your variables in config/application.yml
HELLO: world
development:
HELLO: developers
production:
HELLO: users
Then you can fetch
ENV["HELLO"]

Answer 5

In rails there is gem named as
gem 'dotenv-rails'
By using it we can assign the variables to system level and used in application.
By using simple steps
First create a simple filed in system level at any place with named extension .env
//in application.rb
require 'dotenv'
Dotenv.load('path-of-your-file.env')
And restart your application
Source
Please got the link for the desscription of dot env gem