How to define custom configuration variables in rails

Question

I was wondering how to add custom configuration variables to a rails application and how to access them in the controller, for e.g I want to be able to define an upload_directory in the configuration files say development.rb and be able to access it in one of my controllers.

Secondly I was planning to have S3 support for uploads in my application, if I wanted to add a yaml file with the s3 access, secret key, how do I initialize it in my Rails App and how do I access the values that I have defined in that config file.

Answer 1

In Rails 3, Application specific custom configuration data can be placed in the application configuration object. The configuration can be assigned in the initialization files or the environment files -- say for a given application MyApp:

MyApp::Application.config.custom_config_variable = :my_config_setting 

or

Rails.configuration.custom_config_variable = :my_config_setting 

To read the setting, simply call the configuration variable without setting it:

Rails.configuration.custom_config_variable => :my_config_setting 

UPDATE Rails 4

In Rails 4 there a new way for this => http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#custom-configuration