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I'm planning to build a group of several Rails applications on Heroku, and I want to share accounts, user data, and maybe some other information between these applications and the "main" Rails app. What would be the easiest and most effective way of doing this?

I've heard that one way of doing this is to make all the applications share the same database, but I'm not sure if that's really the best solution in my case since I only need to share some information between these apps. Another thing I've considered is using the CAS protocol, but that only seems to handle authentication (I can't use it to get user's names and email addresses). Suggestions?

Ajedi32
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  • Check out http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5981508/share-database-between-2-apps-in-heroku for how to share databases. I think that's probably the most convenient approach. – Jim Stewart Jan 25 '13 at 02:20
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    Why not have a "Authentication" database which defines users roles and what other apps/systems the users is "Configured" to use. then each app has its own DB? no reason why you can't have multiple connections is there? – xQbert Jan 25 '13 at 02:28
  • @xQbert That sounds like it could work, but is that possible with Heroku? – Ajedi32 Jan 25 '13 at 03:13
  • THis previous SO post seems to think so http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7677544/how-to-use-multiple-databases-for-one-rails-3-1-app-in-heroku – xQbert Jan 25 '13 at 03:34
  • Hmm, in that case though the second database is hosted by Amazon. Would the fact that both databases are hosted by Heroku cause problems for me? – Ajedi32 Jan 25 '13 at 03:45

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Here's how I'm considering doing this.

Create a master app with user authentication.

Have each sub-app do omni auth with the master app.

Then the master app will house all the user data, and the sub-app will get the authentication info necessary plus the user data. I haven't figured out how to make sure that new user data will be saved in the master app, but it seems like you would just send the user to the master app, then have them returned once they've entered the data.

Any suggesting from you Rails experts out there before I sink a week into doing it this way.

bobbdelsol
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