Configuring the Playground

Vanity will work out of the box on a default configuration. Assuming you’re using Redis on localhost, post 6379, there’s nothing special to do.

Database connection information is loaded from config/vanity.yml, based on the current environment (RACK_ENV or RAILS_ENV). Example:

development:
  adapter: redis
production:
  adapter: mongodb
  database: analytics

If there’s no configuration file and the application does not create a connection explicitly, Vanity will default to the Redis instance running on localhost at port 6379.

You want Vanity to collect information (metrics, experiments, etc) in production, but there’s no point collecting data in other environments. You can turn data collection on and off by setting Vanity.playground.collecting. Under Rails, collection is turned off in all environments expect production.

You may want to turn data collection on for integration tests, depending on what you’re testing. Also, you may need to turn it on if your development server runs more than one process, e.g. if you’re using Passenger for development and want to use the Vanity console to pick a particular alternative in an A/B test.

Available configuration options are:

name	Is all about …	Default
load_path	Directory containing experiment files	experiments
logger	This should be obvious	default/Rails
collecting	False if you won’t want data collected	true

When running under Rails, Vanity defaults to using the Rails logger, locates the load_path relative to Rails root, uses the config/vanity.yml configuration file (if present) and turns collection on only in production mode.

If you run a different setup, use the playground object to configure Vanity. For example:

Vanity.playground.load_path = "exp"
Vanity.playground.establish_connection "redis://db.example.com"