Code ownership for Rails

Check out Scaling the Monolith for other tips

🍊 Battle-tested at Instacart

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem "ownership"

Ownership provides the ability to specify owners for different parts of the codebase. We highly recommend owners are teams rather than individuals. You can then use this information however you’d like, like routing errors to the correct team.

class OrdersController < ApplicationController
  owner :logistics
end

You can use any options that before_action supports.

class OrdersController < ApplicationController
  owner :logistics, only: [:index]
  owner :customers, except: [:index]
end

class SomeJob < ApplicationJob
  owner :logistics
end

owner :logistics do
  # code
end

You can set a default owner with:

Ownership.default_owner = :logistics

There are a few built-in integrations with other gems.

• Active Record
• AppSignal
• Honeybadger
• Rollbar

You can also add custom integrations.

Active Record has the option to add comments to queries.

SELECT ...
/*application:MyApp,controller:posts,action:index,owner:logistics*/

Add to config/application.rb:

config.active_record.query_log_tags_enabled = true
config.active_record.query_log_tags << :owner

The AppSignal gem integrates with Ownership automatically. Error and performance samples in AppSignal will be tagged with the specified owner.

You can set AppSignal's ownership_set_namespace configuration option to true in order to use the specified owner as an AppSignal namespace, which allows you to easily list performance actions and error incidents for each namespace.

Honeybadger tracks exceptions. This integration makes it easy to send exceptions to different projects based on the owner. We recommend having a project for each team.

Ownership::Honeybadger.api_keys = {
  logistics: "token1",
  customers: "token2"
}

Also works with a proc

Ownership::Honeybadger.api_keys = ->(owner) { ENV["#{owner.to_s.upcase}_HONEYBADGER_API_KEY"] }

Rollbar tracks exceptions. This integration makes it easy to send exceptions to different projects based on the owner. We recommend having a project for each team.

Ownership::Rollbar.access_token = {
  logistics: "token1",
  customers: "token2"
}

Also works with a proc

Ownership::Rollbar.access_token = ->(owner) { ENV["#{owner.to_s.upcase}_ROLLBAR_ACCESS_TOKEN"] }

For version 3.1+ of the rollbar gem, add to config/initializers/rollbar.rb:

config.use_payload_access_token = true

You can define a custom block of code to run with:

Ownership.around_change = proc do |owner, block|
  puts "New owner: #{owner}"
  block.call
  puts "Done"
end

Exceptions that bubble up from an owner block have the owner, which your exception reporting library can use.

begin
  owner :logistics do
    raise "error"
  end
rescue => e
  puts e.owner # :logistics
end

• GitHub Code Owners for code reviews

Thanks to Nick Elser for creating this pattern.

View the changelog

Everyone is encouraged to help improve this project. Here are a few ways you can help:

• Report bugs
• Fix bugs and submit pull requests
• Write, clarify, or fix documentation
• Suggest or add new features

To get started with development and testing:

git clone https://github.com/ankane/ownership.git
cd ownership
bundle install
bundle exec rake test