upgrading appconstants to rails 3
Back in January I announced a small but useful plugin called AppConstants, that basically provides a central place where you can store environment specific constants. And since I started using Rails 3 in the past week, I thought I'd make it Rails 3 compatible.
The code is really simple and - as I expected - the upgrade process was quite straight forward.
I'm not gonna write a guide here on how to upgrade your plugins to Rails 3 - there is plenty about that around the web - but instead, just show the steps I went through to upgrade mine. Similar plugins might have a similar upgrade path.
- Generators
My plugin makes use of a simple generator that copies its default constants file and initializer to Rails.root/config and Rails.root/config/initializers, respectively. In Rails 2.x it was located under Rails.root/vendor/plugins/app_constants/generators/app_constants and it was defined like so:
In Rails 3, the generators had to be moved to Rails.root/vendor/plugins/app_constants/lib/generators. Notice the root directory app_constants under generators has been removed as well. And the code was changed to this:
We had three simple changes here:
- The generator now extends from Rails::Generators::Base: This class uses the Thor infrastructure to handle generators. - more info here.
- I had to implement the source_root class method, which basically tells your generator where to find your template files.
- The manifest method is now called copy_config_files - or anything you want.
The way this works is that, once you invoke the generator, Thor will sequentially call all instance methods in your generator class - or the only instance method in the example above. If your generator does a lot, it will allow for a better organization of your tasks.
And that's it! I did change a couple of other things but that had to be changed anyway and are not related to the migration.
For Rails 2.3.x users, you'll find a 2.3.x branch on github that should work for you.
Cheers