Staging subdomains when application already has subdomains

Question

My current Rails application has the following subdomains:

ui.myapp.com
api.myapp.com

I want to set up a staging environment, and I am wondering what is the best approach in order to set the domains.

Usually, I would do:

staging.myapp.com

But then, how do I access the UI/API sites?

Is it 'ok' to do:

ui.staging.myapp.com
api.staging.myapp.com

?

Answer 1

Assumption: The output from API call is expected in JSON format.

It will not be advisable to use separate subdomain for functionality like api.staging.myapp.com. You can always use the same url for web application and API Better way would be to use same controller-action from Rails application but instead to return JSON output hash.

For example to get the users, you will have some code in users_controller.rb as

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html do
        render :index
      end
      format.json do
        render :json => {:users => @users}
      end
    end
  end
end

Now here if the request is html it will render the html page else it will return the json response.

staging.myapp.com/users will get you the html page of web application displaying users collection and that of staging.myapp.com/users.json will provide you the json response hash of users collection.

So, you will not need different subdomain to distinguish the api and normal site. But using format of request you can distinguish the functionality.

I hope this answers your question. If you still have any query feel free to ask.