可为不同客户定制的Rails应用程序

Question

I will try to make this as clear as possible this is a very difficult situation and I will try to explain as clear as possible. I have not many experience in Rails but I want to do Rails in the best way I can. I've created a previous topic before but I don't really understand it Managing Large Scale apps via Rails .

Original situation:

We have had an app developed with only 1 customer in mind. To feed the customer needs we have the following branches:

• Development
• Customer DEV (separate site for testing new developments)
• Customer ACC (separate site for accepting changes)
• Customer PRD (the customer production website)

Current situation:

Now we have a second customer and all the branches have doubled. So we are now developing changes for each customer separately. These changes may include model/controller/helper changes and they have a different stylesheet (sass/css) and also different HTML.

So our 1 app has been split into 2 separate apps for 2 customers. And now I have to remembered what I did in each branch and try to implement it into other branches.

Problem:

I'm totally going to lose control of managing these apps if more customers buy it. So each customers could have different CSS / different HTML / different Models/Controllers/Library.

Problem Examples:

• Each customer has different config/connections.yml file
• Each customer has different translation files config/locales/en.yml
• One customer wants to have a database with Users (model/controller) the other doesn't want to keep the users in the DB

My thoughts:

I'm really scared on losing the control of this app when more customers will buy this app. I'm scared that I'm going to have 100 Github branches when 25 customers will buy it. I don't know if many people has this problem or maybe should I start all over again with coding these apps. I don't know if this is even possible but if anyone could help me that would be awesome.

Answer 1

IMHO please consider following points for better management of applications with multiple customers:

1. Instead of creating separate branches for each customer and developing code separately, develop code in same branch for multiple customers(You can continue having 4 branches as per your release management).
2. If there are any features which are required by a customer but not by other then create settings interface for turning a feature on/off. This can be done by storing values in database or using gems like flipper or rollout
3. For different HTML structure and css, do not maintain multiple templates/partials but maintain different layouts for different customers and render respective layout with appropriate css conditionally. Let templates & partials be common to all customers.