Hostel

Hostel is a lightweight library for serving different (but similar) websites from the same Rails application.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hostel'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hostel

Then run:

$ rails g hostel:install

This will create config/initializers/hostel.rb and config/sites.yml.

Configuration

Hostel expects your sites to have three attributes: key, domain_without_subdomain, and subdomain. key and domain_without_subdomain by default come from sites.yml, and subdomain is set in the initializer based on a subdomain value set in your environment files. This allows you to use your /etc/hosts file to match different sites locally and use subdomains in staging environments to map to the correct sites. site.domain will always be the FQDN for the current environment.

You can include any other key/value pairs you like in the YAML configuration file and they will also be given accessors on the corresponding Hostel::Site instance.

Usage

Accessing sites manually

Hostel::Site instances can be looked up by their key using Hostel.find(:yourkey), and you can retrieve an array of all sites with Hostel.all.

The instances will all have your site key names as boolean methods. For example, to test the identify of a Hostel::Site instance, you can call site.google? instead of site.key == :google.

Routing constraints

If you need to constrain a set of routes to a single site in your sites.yml, pass Hostel::DomainConstraint.new(:yoursitekey) to constraint in your routes.rb.

Automatic retrieval of current site

Hostel provides the Hostel::Detectable controller concern. This gives you some convenient utilities:

• current_site is a controller method and a helper method for your views. It matches based on subdomain and domain (not port).
• The site helper takes one or more site keys and a block. This allows you to have site-specific blocks of content in your views -- the content will only render if current_site matches one of the keys given.

Site pinning

In many cases, it's useful to force the value of current_site to one site or another for testing. If site pinning is enabled, Hostel will look for a querystring parameter of pinned. If the value of pinned matches the key of a site, it will set a cookie that will override host-based site detection algorithm.

Site pinning is disabled for production by default in the generated initializer.

Path building

If you want to build links to different tenants on the system, we have a handy new build_path method. This can be used to do cool things.

Example usage:

• Build a link to the upgrade path on the current site

current_site.build_path('upgrade')

• Build a link to a recipe on the current site, insecurely

current_site.build_path('/recipe/2487-some-delicious-recipe', secure: false)

• By default, build_path uses https

• Build a link to the order page, with query parameters

current_site.build_path('order', path_args: { :incode => 'CIOSTUFF', :purchase_type => 'instructor_access' })

• Build a link to the Cooking School Courses page from Everest

Hostel.find('school_main').build_path('courses', secure: false, path_args: { :stuff => 'OTHERSTUFF' })

• Build a link to the support page

current_site.build_path(support_path, secure: false)