Environmentalism

I’ve never really seen the point of environment variables until today. They’ve been slowly introduced into the syllabus at Makers during the bookmark manager project. To start with they were a way determine which database to use; whether the one for the test suite or the one for playing around on the local server.

Something like

env = ENV["RACK_ENV"] || "development" DataMapper.setup(:default,
"postgres://localhost/bookmark_manager_#{env}")

Which is all well and good. Then it comes to getting the app up - let’s say on Heroku.

Heroku has PostgreSQL support, so that’s taken care of by adding a plugin on the dashboard. Tick. Pushing the application to Heroku is easy enough (as long as you haven’t spelled Gemfile in all caps at any point in your Git history. Who would do that?). But then you hit the buffers, because the database isn’t where you’ve told Sinatra it is.

So where is it? Hiding somewhere over at Amazon apparently. If you run heroku config you’ll see a great (OK, tiny) stack of… you guessed it… environment variables. The two key ones to look at are DATABASE_URL and HEROKU_POSTGRES_PINK_URL. Next to them both is a long URL that lets you know that the nice folks at Amazon are taking care of your instance of Postgres on the behalf of Heroku.

So we just jam that URL into the DataMapper setup right?

ruby DataMapper.setup(:default,
"postgres://whole-mess-of-letters.compute-1.amazonaws:porty_goodness_here")

Wrong. That URL is a magic number, it’s specific to the Heroku server you’re pushing to. But what about James? What about Vincent? Maybe they want to have an instance of their own. Or what if Heroku go and migrate your database to another cloud supplier? Bad times.

Environment variables to the rescue. Look, it’s right there in the config: DATABASE_URL. Just jam that sucker into the DataMapper setup. Of course, you need to make sure that you’re using it in Heroku, so maybe some sort of if statement to make sure you’re using it in the right place. Not pretty, but…

if env.include?(/heroku/)
    DataMapper.setup(:default, ENV["DATABASE_URL"])
else
    DataMapper.setup(:default, "postgres://localhost/bookmark_manager_#{env}")
end

Environment variables. No longer a ‘nice to have’.