Ownership

Code ownership for Rails

Check out Scaling the Monolith for other tips

🍊 Battle-tested at Instacart

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem "ownership"

Getting Started

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.

Specifying Ownership

Controllers

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

Jobs

class SomeJob < ApplicationJob
  owner :logistics
end

Anywhere

owner :logistics do
  # code
end

Default

You can set a default owner with:

Ownership.default_owner = :logistics

Integrations

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

Active Record
Honeybadger
Marginalia
Rollbar

You can also add custom integrations.

Active Record

Active Record 7+ 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

Honeybadger

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"] }

Marginalia

Marginalia adds comments to Active Record queries. If installed, the owner is added.

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

This can be useful when looking at the most time-consuming queries on your database.

Rollbar

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

Custom Integrations

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

Please don’t hesitate to submit a pull request if you create an integration that others can use.

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

Other Useful Tools

GitHub Code Owners for code reviews

Thanks

Thanks to Nick Elser for creating this pattern.

History

View the changelog.

Contributing

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