How do I make a method available to both my controller and model in Rails?

Question

I have a private method in my Rails app to connect to Amazon S3, execute a passed block of code, then close the connection to S3. It looks like so;

def S3
  AWS:         


        

Answer 1

Your hunch is correct: you can put a module in the lib directory. In order to make these methods available to your models, simply include it with:

class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
  include MyModule
end

The included module's instance methods will become instance methods on your class. (This is known as a mixin)

module MyModule
  def S3
    #...
  end
end