How best to share code between apps?

Rails
1

I come from a PHP environment where we have a “library” of sorts that
contains various functionality in the form of object-oriented
classes. The classes can be tied into any new project and the
functionality of that class is gained without any duplication of
coding efforts.

In learning Ruby on Rails, I’d like to create something similar for
use in developing Rails applications. Is there a best practice for
said “library” of functionality? How best is this code base shared
between applications? Most importantly, how can updates to said
library be easily reflected across all applications?

For instance, we want to have a single login/logout user capability
between applications, since all of our applications will share the
same userbase. I know restful_authentication exists, but I’m working
on rolling my own as a learning exercise.

Give a User Model, Session (login/logout) and User (registration/
activation) Controllers, and an Authentication Module, what is the
best way to share this code set across applications?

2

Plugins.

3

Plugins.

4

But aren’t plugins packaged with the application? How does that work
for updates to the code?

5

On 16 Feb 2009, at 05:56, ericindc wrote:

But aren’t plugins packaged with the application? How does that work
for updates to the code?

Plugins as git submodules.

Google search will probably reveal more, but this is one I came across
just now:
http://woss.name/2008/04/09/using-git-submodules-to-track-vendorrails/

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

6

I second plugins as git submodules. My company has built up a suite
of standard plugins we use in apps for various things, and with git
submodules it’s easy to cascade updates to those plugins to all the
apps that use them.

I’ll give you a piece of advice that took me forever to sort out. The
two following commands are not equivalent:

(Assuming vendor/plugins/my_plugin is the root of your submodule)
$ git add vendor/plugins/my_plugin
$ git add vendor/plugins/my_plugin/

The trailing slash (often added my tab completion) gives you all sorts
of problems with submodules. Beware! :wink:

Cheers,
Darrik

7

But aren’t plugins packaged with the application? How does that work
for updates to the code?

even in “the old days” (way back when everyone was still using
subversion - must have been at least a year ago) this was possible.
today (with git) it’s more or less the same.
store your plugin’s code in a repository. inside your application
checkout this plugin and everytime you commit any changes to the code
in your repository, just update your plugin.