title: What is the best practice for an environment based configuration file in Ruby on Rails
body: <p>I have several properties that are dependent on the environment the application is running. For example, there are links to another application that is being developed concurrantly that get displayed in the header and footer. I want those links to be different depending on what environment they are in. </p>
  
  <p>This is slightly different than the way we use the out of box enviornment configuration files because our system administrator has mongrel running in 'Production' mode even on the development server. I only run mongrel in 'Development' mode on my laptop.  </p>
  
  <p>Is there a standard way for handling situations like this? Or should we run mongrel in "Development" mode on the dev server and so on up the line. In that case, what happens if have an extra level in our env hierarchy. (Dev, Test, UAT, Production)</p>