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Using Rails Engines to Supercharge Your Team

Rails engines are self-contained modules that can be used inside of a larger Ruby on Rails application to encapsulate complex functionality and expose it with a tight, well defined API.

Austin Story

Director, Infra Product Platform, Doximity

Schedule Entry

Attendees​

  • Reed
RelevancyInteresting
66

Notes​

Story of how Doximity used Rails engines to deploy a sophisticated application.

  • Gem is shared Ruby code
  • Engine integrates with Rails
  • GraphQL is a way to describe data, includes documentation, typed responses, safer changes, unified
  • Backend perspective – no internal standard, isolation harder, developer experience was atrocious
  • GraphQL Federation (app name) was the answer
  • Restored internal standards to backend, isolation, and improved developer experience
  • Started with Rails Guides documentation
  • Plan approach – setup engine, create GraphQL playground
  • Engine is a mountable plugin
  • Focus heavily on dummy application provided as part of test harness
  • Make sure dummy app exposes every feature of engine so we don’t have to deploy engine to test changes
  • Mount controller action in engine’s internal routes
  • Inherit controller from ActionController::Base so that Application doesn’t impact engine
  • Includes Authentication by default because it’s not optional
  • Includes generators to make installing Engine easier
  • Includes RSpec helper
  • Includes ActiveSupport instrumentation
  • Integrated with CI to monitor schema changes
  • Includes Rake tasks
  • Uses Railties to provide Rake tasks and update Playground