How do you declare an object and make it available throughout your rails application?

Question

I'm trying define a connection to an external storage provider. To open the connection, normally I would do

storage = Fog::Storage.new {lots more stuff here}

This means putting very secret credentials in the code every where I want to access the storage object. There has to be a better way?

Answer 1

If you define a constant in a file in config/initializers , that file will be require d at app start and the constant will be generally available. For instance:

config/initializers/config.rb

Storage = Fog::Storage.new { stuff }

app/models/mymodel.rb

do_something_with(Storage)

Answer 2

There is. Create a fog.yml or something, and place it in your config folder (you'll want to ignore this in version control).

Then set the credentials:

credentials: &credentials
  username: yourname
  password: yourpass

development:
  <<: *credentials

test:
  <<: *credentials

production:
  <<: *credentials

(I don't use fog so I don't really know what information you need). Then make a new initializer file, fog.rb or something, and place it in config/initializers . Put this inside so it gets loaded when the app is initialized:

config = YAML.load_file("#{Rails.root}/config/fog.yml")[Rails.env]
FogStorage = Fog::Storage.new { config['username'], config['password'] }

Then you can use that global FogStorage anywhere.

Again, be sure you ignore the credentials file for version control, and just make a symlink to it in deployment.