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Picky: Environmental Considerations

ruby / picky

This is a post in the Picky series on its workings.

(Man, being in Australia is cool in that I can post on the 18th, while most of you are still wallowing in the 17th)

This is a Google Analytics driven post. I saw recently that many people looked for “Picky environment and Rails” or similar.

PICKY_ENVIRONMENT and PICKY_ROOT

Almost like e.g. Rails, Picky has an constant ready for your environment handling: PICKY_ENVIRONMENT.

That’s what you use to differentiate, for example, data source files from each other. So you might have a data directory with population data for zimbabwe in the CSV format. It would be a good idea to have three different files, data/development/zimbabwe.csv, data/test/zimbabwe.csv, and data/production/zimbabwe.csv.

(Since for testing you probably use only a subset of your data)

Then, in your index data source definition, use PICKY_ENVIRONMENT:

Index::Memory.new(:zimbabwe) do
  source Sources::CSV.new(file: "data/#{PICKY_ENVIRONMENT}/zimbabwe.csv")
  # ...
end

Well, you’re probably used to that from using Rails, right?

It may be interesting how this constant is defined.

ENV['PICKY_ENV'] ||= ENV['RACK_ENV']

PICKY_ENVIRONMENT = ENV['PICKY_ENV'] || 'development' unless defined? PICKY_ENVIRONMENT

So, if you haven’t set the PICKY_ENV environment variable, Picky will use the one set by Rack. Then, if you haven’t set PICKY_ENVIRONMENT explicitly by hand, Picky will use the environment variable to set PICKY_ENVIRONMENT.

So you have two overriding possibilities: Either through an env variable, or through setting a Ruby constant.

PICKY_ROOT is also available, and is defined like this:

PICKY_ROOT = Dir.pwd unless defined? PICKY_ROOT

It just uses the current directory, unless you want it to point somewhere else, explicitly. Everywhere in Picky where a file is used (mostly in the data sources), PICKY_ROOT is used.

Conclusion

So we’ve seen

  1. how PICKY_ENVIRONMENT and PICKY_ROOT are set.
  2. how you can use PICKY_ENVIRONMENT to your advantage.

Hope you learnt something new!

Next Picky: Geosearch 1

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