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Comment by tabbyjabby | Hacker News Reader

Do your Sinatra apps have access to the Rails models?

I don't know what github is doing about their models, but I have fairly easy solution of my own: I always symlink models in my projects.

We have 2 large Rails projects and an API server using Goliath[1], one of the Rails projects and the goliath server use models with symlinks.

[1] Goliath: http://postrank-labs.github.com/goliath/

Why not package them as a gem?

We are still doing massive development, once our codebase is stable enough we will move them into small gems, right now it's just a bit of hassle running bundle update for every small increment.

You can plan this migration ahead of time by moving your models into gems stored in, say, vendor/future_gems/. Then just reference each gem in bundler as:

gem "my_models", path: "vendor/future_gems/my_models/"

Once you are able to break them out completely, just remove the path reference and use a gem server instead.

Yup, they're all mounted in the same ruby process.

Are you able to provide more detail on how something like this would be set up?

Rails 3.0 just does this; given a FooApp Sinatra object, yo can match "/foo" :to => FooApp.

Also doable without rails:

  # In config.ru
  # App, V0, and Resque::Server are each sinatra apps
  run Rack::URLMap.new({
    "/"       => App.new,
    "/v0"     => V0.new,
    "/resque" => Resque::Server.new,
  })

Any app built on Rack (which includes Rails, Sinatra, and many other Ruby frameworks) can be mounted this way. See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#routing-to-rack-a...

We use Unicorn, which provides a Rack handler for Rails 2.2 apps. I just mounted the an API router app before the Rails handler in our config.ru. The API router app is just a big regex that looks for API related urls, or passes through to Rails. Though, jnunemaker recently showed me a trick where you can mount Sinatra apps in other Sinatra apps through `#use` (like any Middleware). I may try that out and get away from my ghetto regex routes.

We recently upgraded to Rails 2.3 which is built on Rack. `ActionController::Dispatcher.new` is the last Rack app on the stack now.

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