dotenv VS Redis

This is the second part of my Test Driving a Rails API series. In Part 1 we set up our development environment, generated a Rails API-only application, installed dotenv to easily store configuration values in the environment, and installed and configured PostgreSQL version 16 as our database.

Storing environment variables for a Rails app can be problematic. The dotenv gem will automatically, when Rails boots, load environment variables from .env files into the Rails ENV. This is a great way to store private information that varies per developer or deployment environment, such as your development database configuration. Rails Encrypted Credentials is a great way to store private information, like API keys, etc, but I wouldn’t use it for storing my local development environment’s database information. The Encrypted Credentials file is checked into the git repository and would, therefore, be shared by all developers on the project. dotenv allows each developer or deployment environment to store their own information in .env files that are ignored by git.

dotenv

Install the dotenv gem.

dotenv-rails

Yeah, now that I think of it, it does require a gem. I have used this in most projects https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv

One of the challenges Redis labs here have is that there's very little reason for their userbase to stay loyal to them.

antirez retired from Redis development a few years ago.

From https://github.com/redis/redis/graphs/contributors it looks like activity since he left has been mostly from people who didn't overlap with him much.

Redis Labs have not shown themselves to be outstanding stewards of the project as far as I can tell. Why shouldn't people support the fork?

Redis

Redis - real time data storage with different data structures in a cache

[0] https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md

Cache: a Redis cache