February 2018

ActiveRecord is great! There’s something deeply satisfying about typing User.all and having that just pull all the users from a database. Or typing user.phone_number = "555-5555" and user.save to update a users phone number in the database.

But what if you don’t even want a database? What if you’d rather just stick all your juicy data right in plain old files and directories, where anyone can easily browse and update it? Then you don’t even need a web server with routes and controllers and views! People can just use a file browser to do all that. Want a list of users? Easy, that’s just ls users. Want a list of user phone numbers? That’s gonna be cat users/*/phone_number. Want to update a phone number? Easy peasy, just do echo 555-5555 >> users/gertrude/phone_number. Slick!

Or at least that was the idea that inspired Dirable. It allowed me to quickly bootstrap a Ruby application that just needed to move some files around and keep track of some state alongside them. I also wanted people to be able to access and update the state manually but it felt overkill to setup a database and a web interface just for that purpose.

Check out the code on GitHub! Its designed so that you can easily plug in your own Ruby class to talk to a remote filesystem such as HDFS or S3 or whatever your heart may desire!