Can I have common namespaces in new rails applications?

Question

Is it possible to create whole rails applications under a common namespace?

Lets assume that my company name is Acme, Inc. and I have the following rails projects: Blog, Store, WebService.

By default, if I do something like rails new blog the generated applications will be like:

module Blog
  class Application < Rails::Application

module Store
  class Application < Rails::Application

module WebService
  class Application < Rails::Application

where every project/application is self contained and there is no implicit reference to the company. Ideally I would like to have all this applications under the company namespace, so we can refer to them as:

AcmeInc::Blog::Application
  AcmeInc::Blog::Entities::Article

AcmeInc::Store::Application
  AcmeInc::Store::Entities::Product
  AcmeInc::Store::Entities::Order
  AcmeInc::Store::Entities::Customer

etc...

Is this possible? Recommended?

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Using: ruby-2.0.0-p451, rails 3.2.17

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Update

Snapshot of generated files and project structure after doing rails new acme/blog as suggested:

Answer 1

The correct way to do this is with engines. Each engine is like a standalone app, with it's own routes, test suite, etc, but you can have some common infrastructure like rake tasks, etc.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html

Answer 2

I think I am probably late here to answer this, as others have already suggested nice approaches. Like, maintaining code within one common repository and creating rails engine.

I would like to share this famous project called spree, which follows the architecture you're looking for. You can visit spree's code on github here.

For example:

• Spree::Core - spree_core engine as a gem to maintain all models and base modules etc.
• Spree::Backend - spree_backend engine as a gem to maintain all admin related controllers, views, assets etc.
• Spree::Frontend - spree_frontend engine as a gem to maintain user facing code i.e. controllers, views, assets related to it.

I guess you can use it as a reference for your application development.

Answer 3

If your trying to manage your code, why don't you just make a Blog Gem that you can include in each application. Then you would manage the code under one common repository for the Gem. Sees to me that's the Rails/Ruby way to do this