Where to store (structured) configuration data in Rails

Question

For the Rails 3 application I'm writing, I am considering reading some of the configuration data from XML, YAML or JSON files on the local filesystem.

The point is: where should I put those files? Is there any default location in Rails apps where to store this kind of content?

As a side note, my app is deployed on Heroku.

Answer 1

What I always do is:

• If the file is a general configuration file: I create a YAML file in the directory /config with one upper class key per environment
• If I have a file for each environment (big project): I create one YAML per environment and store them in /config/environments/

Then I create an initializer where I load the YAML, I symbolize the keys of the config hash and assign it to a constant like APP_CONFIG

Answer 2

I will usually adopt this method :

a config/config.yml

development:
  another_key: "test"
  app_name: "My App"
test:
  another_key: "test"
production:
  prova: "ciao"

then create a ostruct in a initializer

#config/initializer/load_config.rb
require 'ostruct'
config = OpenStruct.new(YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/config.yml"))
::AppSetting = OpenStruct.new(config.send(RAILS_ENV))

No DB table, per environment setup and you could retrive info in a simple way

AppSetting.another_key
AppSetting.app_name

here a reference
have a nice day!