image_processing VS dotenv

Ruby on Rails 7 uses the image_processing gem to resize images, so either uncomment image_processingfrom you Gemfile, or add it if it is not already present.

- [image_processing](https://github.com/janko/image_processing)

image_processing

Working with images is as easy as possible; creating variants to display images in different sizes might be the most common use case in a Rails Application. The image_processing gem is responsible for abstracting the complexity of creating an image variant, like resizing the image to be 300px on the longest side.

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