[LRUG] Multiple Rails apps sharing common UI

[Stuart Harrison]

Might also be worth looking at Slimmer, built by GDS https://github.com/alphagov/slimmer

It’s a bit of Rack middleware that allows you to apply a standard header and footer, served from a different host. For example, the header and footer for http://theodi.org/ is served via http://static.theodi.org/templates/www.html.erb - we probably don’t use it to the best of its ability, but it sounds like it would suit your needs perfectly. Our static app is a rails app, but it could just as easily be a simple sinatra app, or even just static HTML.

-- 
Stuart Harrison
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On 19 May 2015 at 10:11:26, Alejandro Andres (alej at redradix.com) wrote:

I've done something similar, sepparating the apps by subdomain, using the same rails app. That way you have a 'namespace' for each app (the subdomain). For shared data I had an api subdomain (but beware because then you'll have to use CORS)

Hope it helps :)

-
Alejandro Andrés
Partner at redradix.com

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Kerry Buckley <kerryjbuckley at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi LRUG,

I have a small Rails app used by a closed set of internal users, and am about to create another, for the same users (or at least an overlapping group). They've asked that the two apps (and potentially more over time) are presented as one integrated front end, rather than users having to visit multiple URLs, log in separately etc.

I'm wondering what the best approach to this is. I don't want to go to the extreme of a JS front end with the Rails apps just presenting JSON APIs, so the main options seem to be:

* Separate apps with matching layouts, and headers, with some kind of single sign-on
* One big app with namespaced routes, controllers etc to try and keep things vaguely separated
* Separate apps into Rails engines, mounted in a master app that manages sessions etc

I'm kind of leaning towards the third option, but I've never used Rails engines before, and I'm not 100% sure how that approach would work out. My main concern is acceptance/integration tests – it seems to me like they'd have to live in the wrapper app as most of them would rely on users, sessions etc.

Has anyone had experience of this kind of thing, and if so, which of the above approaches would you recommend (or discourage)? Is there a better solution I've missed? I'm about to start spiking something with engines to see how things fall together, but some opinions from someone who's done it in anger would be great!

Thanks,

Kerry

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