On thing that has struck me about dynamic languages is that you don’t
need configuration files at all. You can just alter the definitions
directly in the Ruby code.
So if everything is Ruby and configuration files are frowned upon, why
does Rails store the database connectors in a config file ‘database.yml’
plus whatever syntactic sugar is required to get the thing in the right
place.
I know it doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to understand the logic or
history behind it. At the moment it seems a bit of an anathema in an
otherwise elegant structure.
plus whatever syntactic sugar is required to get the thing in the right
place.
I know it doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to understand the logic or
history behind it. At the moment it seems a bit of an anathema in an
otherwise elegant structure.
The YAML file is just the Ruby hash you put in you rmessage, dumped
out to a config file. YAML is nice because it’s easy to dump and
reload.
One problem with ‘database.rb’ is that it would be a little harder to
make a change and save it.
Stated another way, .rb files are meant to be edited by people, .yml
files can easily be edited by people or by code.
When the YAML file is read in, it becomes a regular old Hash.
The YAML file is just the Ruby hash you put in your message, dumped
out to a config file. YAML is nice because it’s easy to dump and
reload.
Yes, but it’s also awful. Lots of people have trouble with the
‘two leading spaces, not tabs’ issue, for example. And how often do
you reload (or
dynamically write) your rails config hash?
A Ruby hash isn’t much harder to write out than a YAML hash
(we’re not talking Java and XML here), and you’d have a lot more
flexibility in doing things that (e.g.) yaml aliases are currently used
for if
you just had a class method to populate the config hash.
I’d suggest it’s YAML based for historical reasons -
otherwise we’d be looking at routes.yml etc.
I’d suggest it’s YAML based for historical reasons -
otherwise we’d be looking at routes.yml etc.
Except that routes can contain a bunch of logic, which you can’t put
into YAML.
Configuration files are very rarely written in the same language as the
app. Part of the idea is that you don’t want people to have to know the
language to configure your application. I’m sure there are other
reasons, that’s just the first one that comes to mind.
Configuration files are very rarely written in the same language as the
app. Part of the idea is that you don’t want people to have to know the
language to configure your application. I’m sure there are other
reasons, that’s just the first one that comes to mind.
Actually, I really like Ruby for configuration. It’s actually just a
legacy decision that database.yml is in YAML. We’ve been discussing
various ways to refactor that into a nice Ruby configuration that
would probably be part of environment.rb and friends. But it just
hasn’t been high priority enough to work on yet.