Static data files for your Rails static pages

Thursday 6 March 2014

Suppose you have a rails application and you want to add some static pages to communicate about your product. You may want to add a page with all your team members on it. Where should you store this not so dynamic data?

You could copy-paste all the HTML needed to display the first team member and update the content for every other one, but this is not really DRY.

So should you add a CMS engine to your application or create a model for your team and set up active_admin?

YAML as your data repository

Let’s KISS.

Your “dynamic” team data can be put in a simple YAML file.

# config/data/team.yml
members:
  - name: George Abitbol
    title: CEO
    photo: george_abitbol.png
  - name: Un dénommé José
    title: CFO
    photo: jose.png

which you make available in your rails app through an initializer and a global variable.

# config/initializers/team.rb
TEAM = YAML.load_file("#{Rails.root}/config/data/team.yml")

Then you can use TEAM in your team view (I use high_voltage for my static pages).

<%# app/views/pages/team.html.erb #>
<% TEAM['members'].each do |member| %>
  <div>
    <h3><%= member['name'] %></h3>
    <h4><%= member['title'] %></h4>
    <%= image_tag "team/#{member['photo']}" %>
  </div>
<% end %>

What do you think? How do you handle this use case?