Create gems to encapsulate non-core dotenv features about dotenv

[bkeepers]

Interpret my radio silence on this issue as indecision and not contempt. I've been trying to think through this, and I'm really undecided. dotenv was purely intended to be a development shim.

I feel like there are better ways of loading environment variables in production. In my ideal fantasy land, a project's repository should only contain information needed to for local development. Deployment is a separate concern and should be managed externally. I would put hostnames, production configuration, etc in a separate deployment repository (with some Chef/puppet to manage provisioning).

But…that's easy for me to say, because everything I work on is deployed to Heroku or internally at GitHub. Either way, I don't have to manage it and deal with deployment infrastructure. The reality is that most people are deploying Rails apps directly with capistrano. Everything needed by the app is managed in the same repo. No matter how much I try to discourage that, I understand that it is the easiest thing that works.

So I think I would like to push the dotenv-rails gem to encourage my ideal fantasy-land, but also release a dotenv-deployment gem that has capistrano recipes, multiple environment support, unicorn reloading and whatever else people think they need to deploy.

How does that sound?

[elskwid]

@bkeepers, it sounds like a great idea. So you want to break dotenv-rails and dotenv-deployment into repos? I like it. Point me at the repos and I'll help you get this stuff sorted out.

[afeld]

FYI, Foreman supports running one-off processes (loading the .env files) with foreman run <command>.

/cc @dblock #76 (comment)