What is the best way to store app specific configuration in rails?

Question

I need to store app specific configuration in rails. But it has to be:

• reachable in any file (model, view, helpers and controllers
• environment specifi

Answer 1

The most basic thing to do is to set a class variable from your environment.rb. I've done this for Google Analytics. Essentially I want a different key depending on which environment I'm in so development or staging don't skew the metrics.

This is how I did it.

In lib/analytics/google_analytics.rb:

module Analytics
  class GoogleAnalytics
    @@account_id = nil

    cattr_accessor :account_id
  end
end

And then in environment.rb or in environments/production.rb or any of the other environment files:

Analytics::GoogleAnalytics.account_id = "xxxxxxxxx"

Then anywhere you ned to reference, say the default layout with the Google Analytics JavaScript, it you just call Analytics::GoogleAnalytics.account_id.