From: Robert Evans <robert.evans@...>
Date: 2007-03-09T07:20:59+09:00
Subject: Managing Environments for ruby apps

Hi all,

Over the last couple of years I have accumulated a fair amount of  
Ruby code across a couple of projects at work, and I have factored  
out several components into reusable libraries, although I haven't  
needed to turn them into gems yet. Each component looks like a  
standard library with subdirectories for lib and test. Lib has the  
code and test has the tests. I have rake files for running tests and  
various other subdirectories for support resources in the root of  
each component.

To manage the project dependencies, I setup a common config.rb then I  
call that from my application to fill the loadpath with the required  
libraries. This allows me to keep my various libraries and rb files  
portable by just adding in a require "config" and then simple  
"require"'s for any given dependencies in the class, without  
specifying path info in the require arg. It grew out of a desire for  
modularity as my scripts became applications and spanned multiple  
projects.

This simple step has made it easy to manage my various applications  
and my libraries on which they depend. I have also paid particular  
interest to how Rails manages its load path and environment. I am  
curious how others approach the issue of managing ruby projects that  
have dependencies on each other. I am sure there might be other  
clever ways to manage it without going all the way to using gems as  
that seems kind of heavy for internal projects that all share the  
same version control tree.

Thanks,
Bob Evans
http://www.junitfactory.com/
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