ruby-on-rails-3ruby-on-rails-pluginsrails-enginesrailtie

Differences between railties and engines in Ruby On Rails 3


I read a few documents on these arguments, but I did not understand clearly what they are, what are the differences between them and if one of them fits my needs.

I need to write a piece of application which can be plugged in other application and I want to include it in other applications as a gem. Essentially I need a couple of models, one controller and no views, plus some initialization, support for configuration parameters coming from the hosting app and a generator.

Am I on the right way?

What should I read to understand how to do that?

Update:

A very nice article with a lot af details can be found here.

Essentially:

Railtie is the core of the Rails Framework and provides several hooks to extend Rails and/or modify the initialization process.

A Rails::Engine is nothing more than a Railtie with some initializers already set. And since Rails::Application and Rails::Plugin are engines, the same configuration described here can be used in all three.


Solution

  • Railtie can probably do what you describe, but it may be more desirable to use an engine. The engine can have its own configuration and also acts like a Rails application, since it allows you to include the /app directory with controllers, views and models in the same manner as a regular Rails app.

    Read this blog for more info