apartment

Apartment

Multitenancy for Rails and ActiveRecord

Apartment provides tools to help you deal with multiple tenants in your Rails application. If you need to have certain data sequestered based on account or company, but still allow some data to exist in a common tenant, Apartment can help.

HELP!

In order to help drive the direction of development and clean up the codebase, we'd like to take a poll on how people are currently using Apartment. If you can take 5 seconds (1 question) to answer this poll, we'd greatly appreciated it.

View Poll

Excessive Memory Issues on ActiveRecord 4.x

If you're noticing ever growing memory issues (ie growing with each tenant you add) when using Apartment, that's because there's an issue with how ActiveRecord maps Postgresql data types into AR data types. This has been patched and will be released for AR 4.2.2. It's apparently hard to backport to 4.1 unfortunately. If you're noticing high memory usage from ActiveRecord with Apartment please upgrade.

gem 'rails', '4.2.1', github: 'influitive/rails', tag: 'v4.2.1.memfix'

Installation

Rails

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'apartment'

Then generate your Apartment config file using

bundle exec rails generate apartment:install

This will create a config/initializers/apartment.rb initializer file. Configure as needed using the docs below.

That's all you need to set up the Apartment libraries. If you want to switch tenants on a per-user basis, look under "Usage - Switching tenants per request", below.

NOTE: If using postgresql schemas you must use:

• for Rails 3.1.x: Rails ~> 3.1.2, it contains a patch that makes prepared statements work with multiple schemas

Usage

Video Tutorial

How to separate your application data into different accounts or companies. GoRails #47

Creating new Tenants

Before you can switch to a new apartment tenant, you will need to create it. Whenever you need to create a new tenant, you can run the following command:

Apartment::Tenant.create('tenant_name')

If you're using the prepend environment config option or you AREN'T using Postgresql Schemas, this will create a tenant in the following format: "#{environment}_tenant_name". In the case of a sqlite database, this will be created in your 'db/' folder. With other databases, the tenant will be created as a new DB within the system.

When you create a new tenant, all migrations will be run against that tenant, so it will be up to date when create returns.

Notes on PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL works slightly differently than other databases when creating a new tenant. If you are using PostgreSQL, Apartment by default will set up a new schema and migrate into there. This provides better performance, and allows Apartment to work on systems like Heroku, which would not allow a full new database to be created.

One can optionally use the full database creation instead if they want, though this is not recommended

Switching Tenants

To switch tenants using Apartment, use the following command:

Apartment::Tenant.switch('tenant_name') do
  # ...
end

When switch is called, all requests coming to ActiveRecord will be routed to the tenant you specify (with the exception of excluded models, see below). The tenant is automatically switched back at the end of the block to what it was before.

There is also switch! which doesn't take a block, but it's recommended to use switch. To return to the default tenant, you can call switch with no arguments.

Switching Tenants per request

You can have Apartment route to the appropriate tenant by adding some Rack middleware. Apartment can support many different "Elevators" that can take care of this routing to your data.

NOTE: when switching tenants per-request, keep in mind that the order of your Rack middleware is important. See the Middleware Considerations section for more.

The initializer above will generate the appropriate code for the Subdomain elevator by default. You can see this in config/initializers/apartment.rb after running that generator. If you're not using the generator, you can specify your elevator below. Note that in this case you will need to require the elevator manually in your application.rb like so

# config/application.rb
require 'apartment/elevators/subdomain' # or 'domain', 'first_subdomain', 'host'

Switch on subdomain

In house, we use the subdomain elevator, which analyzes the subdomain of the request and switches to a tenant schema of the same name. It can be used like so:

# application.rb
module MyApplication
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain
  end
end

If you want to exclude a domain, for example if you don't want your application to treat www like a subdomain, in an initializer in your application, you can set the following:

# config/initializers/apartment/subdomain_exclusions.rb
Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain.excluded_subdomains = ['www']

This functions much in the same way as Apartment.excluded_models. This example will prevent switching your tenant when the subdomain is www. Handy for subdomains like: "public", "www", and "admin" :)

Switch on first subdomain

To switch on the first subdomain, which analyzes the chain of subdomains of the request and switches to a tenant schema of the first name in the chain (e.g. owls.birds.animals.com would switch to "owls"). It can be used like so:

# application.rb
module MyApplication
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::FirstSubdomain
  end
end

If you want to exclude a domain, for example if you don't want your application to treat www like a subdomain, in an initializer in your application, you can set the following:

# config/initializers/apartment/subdomain_exclusions.rb
Apartment::Elevators::FirstSubdomain.excluded_subdomains = ['www']

This functions much in the same way as the Subdomain elevator. NOTE: in fact, at the time of this writing, the Subdomain and FirstSubdomain elevators both use the first subdomain (#339). If you need to switch on larger parts of a Subdomain, consider using a Custom Elevator.

Switch on domain

To switch based on full domain (excluding the 'www' subdomains and top level domains ie '.com' ) use the following:

# application.rb
module MyApplication
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::Domain
  end
end

Note that if you have several subdomains, then it will match on the first non-www subdomain:

• example.com => example
• www.example.com => example
• a.example.com => a

Switch on full host using a hash

To switch based on full host with a hash to find corresponding tenant name use the following:

# application.rb
module MyApplication
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::HostHash, {'example.com' => 'example_tenant'}
  end
end

Switch on full host, ignoring given first subdomains

To switch based on full host to find corresponding tenant name use the following:

# application.rb
module MyApplication
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::Host
  end
end

If you want to exclude a first-subdomain, for example if you don't want your application to include www in the matching, in an initializer in your application, you can set the following:

Apartment::Elevators::Host.ignored_first_subdomains = ['www']

With the above set, these would be the results:

• example.com => example.com
• www.example.com => example.com
• a.example.com => a.example.com
• www.a.example.com => a.example.com

Custom Elevator

A Generic Elevator exists that allows you to pass a Proc (or anything that responds to call) to the middleware. This Object will be passed in an ActionDispatch::Request object when called for you to do your magic. Apartment will use the return value of this proc to switch to the appropriate tenant. Use like so:

# application.rb
module MyApplication
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # Obviously not a contrived example
    config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::Generic, Proc.new { |request| request.host.reverse }
  end
end

Your other option is to subclass the Generic elevator and implement your own switching mechanism. This is exactly how the other elevators work. Look at the subdomain.rb elevator to get an idea of how this should work. Basically all you need to do is subclass the generic elevator and implement your own parse_tenant_name method that will ultimately return the name of the tenant based on the request being made. It could look something like this:

# app/middleware/my_custom_elevator.rb
class MyCustomElevator < Apartment::Elevators::Generic

  # @return {String} - The tenant to switch to
  def parse_tenant_name(request)
    # request is an instance of Rack::Request

    # example: look up some tenant from the db based on this request
    tenant_name = SomeModel.from_request(request)

    return tenant_name
  end
end

Middleware Considerations

In the examples above, we show the Apartment middleware being appended to the Rack stack with

Rails.application.config.middleware.use Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain

By default, the Subdomain middleware switches into a Tenant based on the subdomain at the beginning of the request, and when the request is finished, it switches back to the "public" Tenant. This happens in the Generic elevator, so all elevators that inherit from this elevator will operate as such.

It's also good to note that Apartment switches back to the "public" tenant any time an error is raised in your application.

This works okay for simple applications, but it's important to consider that you may want to maintain the "selected" tenant through different parts of the Rack application stack. For example, the Devise gem adds the Warden::Manager middleware at the end of the stack in the examples above, our Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain middleware would come after it. Trouble is, Apartment resets the selected tenant after the request is finish, so some redirects (e.g. authentication) in Devise will be run in the context of the "public" tenant. The same issue would also effect a gem such as the better_errors gem which inserts a middleware quite early in the Rails middleware stack.

To resolve this issue, consider adding the Apartment middleware at a location in the Rack stack that makes sense for your needs, e.g.:

Rails.application.config.middleware.insert_before Warden::Manager, Apartment::Elevators::Subdomain

Now work done in the Warden middleware is wrapped in the Apartment::Tenant.switch context started in the Generic elevator.

Dropping Tenants

To drop tenants using Apartment, use the following command:

Apartment::Tenant.drop('tenant_name')

When method is called, the schema is dropped and all data from itself will be lost. Be careful with this method.

Config

The following config options should be set up in a