How can you set up a multi-tenant Rails app without using subdomains?

Question

I'm trying to create a SAAS e-commerce tool with a backend for staff that also allows customers to have accounts and checkout on the front end. I'm struggling with how to design this so that the Company, Account Owners, Staff, and Customers are all siloed off to each Company, while also having the appropriate restrictions based on their roles.

From what I've read so far most of the rails solutions use multi-tenant patterns with subdomains, such as the Apartment gem, to silo off accounts. But it seems simpler to just have your site use one big app and database. For instance Basecamp recently switched to this approach with Basecamp3. Newer apps seem to be built this way.

And, should the admin features and the customer accounts / front end shop be separate apps completely, or can you do this with a "majestic monolith"? One big app and database, while large, seems more straight forward to me.

I found this blog post that explains how to do something like this with Pundit, but I'm still having trouble groking the big picture of how this could work with Account Owners, Staff, and Customers all in the same app.

Here are the basic needs for my app:

User Roles

• Account Owner (creates the company's account and has full access to their company's data)
• Staff (invited to join a company and doesn't have access to some of the company's data, such as billing information)
• Customer (can sign up for the site and view products, add the them to cart, but can't access any of the staff or account owner features.)
• All Users (no matter the role) belong to a Company and can't access another company's data. (Thus providing the the ability to run separate stores on the same app, which is needed to run this as a SAAS app.)
• Account Owners and Staff can CRUD Products, but not Customers.

A great analogy would be how Shopify's admin area and customer accounts currently work for shop owners, but unlike Shopify, it doesn't require using subdomains.

Potential Models and Associations

Company
has_many :users, dependent: :destroy
has_many :products, dependent: :destroy

User
belongs_to :company

Product
belongs_to :company

Authorization

• Would it work to use Pundit to restrict the controller actions based on User roles and then ensure that data is siloed off via the Model associations?

Signup Flow

I'm a little fuzzy on how to handle scoping the different User roles and where the "staff invites" and "customer" sign up could fit into a sign up flow.

Would this approach work?

1. Create separate controllers for "Account Owner Signup," "Staff Signup," "Customer Signup," and then embed my signup form into those views. (Using Clearance for authentication and would like to keep that if possible, but just augment it as needed).
2. Account Owner Signup: So if a someone signs up through the New Account Signup controller (with embedded authentication form) they would also create a Company.
3. Staff Invite: The Account Owner can create new Staff Users by inputing a Name and Email address. This creates a new User with the role of "Staff" (and thus cannot become Account Owners on another account). The new "Staff" user is sent an invite email that is basically password reset email inviting them to accept the invitation by creating a password.
4. Customer Signup: If someone signs up through the "Customer Signup" controller, they would automatically be given the user role "customer". Not sure how to set the Company ID in this case. (Pass the company_id as a hidden input on the customer sign up form?)

Is there a better way to design this type of app that I'm missing? Am I on the right track? I have no experience building something like this so any clues would be extremely helpful.

It seems like newer apps follow this type of pattern for multi-tenancy rather than subdomains.

Answer 1

You open with simple e-commerce site but the questions you're asking indicate that you're looking for something that's a little more complex :) You're on the right track.

The acts_as_tenant gem is worth a look. We use this now and it helps make sure your queries are all scoped appropriately.

I would also look at & evaluate rolify if you need to do roles (but don't rule out a boolean flag on your user as well).

I wouldn't rule out devise, but clearance is quite popular.

Using a subdomain might be unrealized work depending on the amount of effort, unless you need to actually use subdomains for vanity purposes (my.example.com vs example.com/my), you can do multi-tenancy without it.

I would consider separate controllers & namespacing for the different roles if their access varies wildly; you can also combine them into singular controllers using Pundit (but this could be unwieldy). You'll still want to use Pundit, however, Pundit can do things like scope the records a user should see.

You're on the right track and asking the right questions but the answers to all of these will depend on other questions (that you probably can't even answer right now).

I have a project where I'm doing what you noted (pundit to restrict data, acts_as_tenant to silo things) but as it develops certain patterns emerge that lead me down a different path. Namespacing admin, rather than doing admin checks inside the same controller for example; because if you re-write to an API you end up trying to make the same endpoint do different things and it's much cleaner to separate out the 2 endpoints behind a namespace & document the actual behavior in my opinion.