Passing different symbols as a parameter depending on the enviroment

I started learning ruby today and I'm having a hard time understanding symbols and how to use them properly.

Right now I'm working on a simple server and website, and when I'm testing on the remote server I use the :TLSv1 certificate, and on my local machine the :SSLv23 certificate just because it works without having anything else.

So to not have to change the certificate when testing on those different environments -- because I can forget to change -- I tried to set up a flag for them like this:

if ENV['environment'] == 'development'
  ssl_method = ":SSLv23"
else
  ssl_method = ":TLSv1"
end

response = HTTParty.get('mywebsite.com/', :ssl_version => ssl_methos.to_sym)

It's not working. It returns this error when I'm trying to connect to localhost:

undefined local variable or method `ssl_method' for #<service> Did you mean? method

What alternative can I use?

UPDATE

Well, I dont know if there is a better alternative so I changed to this and worked.

if ENV['environment'] == 'development'
  $ssl_method = "SSLv23"
else
  $ssl_method = "TLSv1"
end

response = HTTParty.get('mywebsite.com/', :ssl_version => $ssl_method.to_sym)

I forgot to remove the : from the string and I had to use the $ to define as a global variable. I am a python guy so I never thought that a global variable here would be different.

Solution

Something like this should work:

ssl_method =
  if ENV['environment'] == 'development'
    :SSLv23
  else
    :TLSv1
  end

response = HTTParty.get('mywebsite.com/', :ssl_version => ssl_method)

The 2 ssl methods are just symbols in my example. In your get call you were just casting them back to symbols with to_sym, but you don't need to convert them if you initialize them as symbols.

Your code sample has a typo (methos), but I think I know the root cause of the error (or at least have a reasonable guess because I did the same thing when I was testing the behavior).

In your code snippet you used ssl_method (singular, for the 2 assignments), but in your get call you tried to call/look for the ssl_methods variable (plural, in the HTTParty call).

Since ssl_methods wasn't ever assigned as a variable or defined as a method Ruby thought you might have meant to call the method method (which is actually a method in ruby)