Ruby Gems with Persistent data

Question

I want to create ruby application (not rails). This is a console app which will need to persist some data. I'm using pstore as the database. I want to deploy this application as a gem.

My question is: where does my data live?

Currently I've created a data directory as a sibling to the bin directory in a standard gem layout. I would therefore, expect that the gem would be storing its data "inside itself" after it gets deployed. But when I do a local gem install to test, I find that the data is being stored locally to the project files, not somewhere inside the gems directory.

Of course it could be I simply mis-understand what "rake install_gem" is doing. Also, I am vaguely worried that if I need to sudo to install the gem, that it will actually be able to create the data file "inside itself" in the gem directory.

Can someone clarify this a little bit?

Thank you. John Schank

@makevoid - thanks for the reply. Here is the entirety of my main script. In /bin directory... (I added it to the main question because I'm not familiar with how to format content in a comment - and the pasted code looked awful.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

$LOAD_PATH.unshift File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../lib'

require 'timesheet'

begin
  command_hash = TimesheetParser.parse
  store = YAML::Store.new("data/time_entries.yaml")
  tl = TimeLog.new(store)
  ts = Timesheet.new(tl)
  ts.process(command_hash)
rescue Exception => e
  raise if command_hash[:debug]
  puts e.message

Answer 1

On Linux there are two common used locations for storing variable data.

/home/user/.application

If every user needs it's own storage this is usually done in the users home directory. The path for your storage in the users home directory should be

ENV["HOME"] + "/." + $application_name

/var/lib/application

If all users share the storage, or the application is intended to be run by only one user (most daemons), /var is the right place to store all kind of data.

• /var/log for logs
• /var/run for pid's
• /var/lock for lock files
• /var/www for httpservers
• /var/tmp for not important but persistant data
• /var/lib for all other data

The path for your storage in /var should be

"/var/lib/" + $application_name

Make sure, the permissions for this directory are such, that you don't have to let your application run as root.