Discussion on: Make a Ruby gem configurable

[David]

Love that you wrote about this — I see a lot of code that has instance variables that are really configuration vars. I, too, have been guilty of this, whenever I touch code and find myself altering one, I see if it’s too much effort. Most of the time things were simple enough that just needed a hash of key-values needing only a setter and getter. What I end up using is ActiveSupport Configurable. Are you familiar with it and do you use or advise the use of it?

[Vinicius Stock]

I know it exists, but haven't used it myself. Do you find it more convenient? The only drawback in my opinion would be adding activesupport as a dependency if all you need is the configurable part.

[David]

I do! I've read about the different ways to do configurations, several blog posts from different people that I admire. I can't seem to find it in my bookmarks right now, but it's actually how I discovered it... the below is literally pulled from the Rails docs. But yeah, I've done none of the other variants, and found yours very interesting.

require 'active_support/configurable'

class User
  include ActiveSupport::Configurable
end

user = User.new

user.config.allowed_access = true
user.config.level = 1

user.config.allowed_access # => true
user.config.level          # => 1

docs