Using Rails Migration on different database than standard “production” or “development”

Question

I have a rails project running that defines the standard production:, :development and :test DB-connections in config/database.yml

In addition I have a quiz_developm

Answer 1

Hey I been digging into this for a few days and I ended up with this solution, just wanted to share it, it might help someone.

Here the complete gist for it. https://gist.github.com/rafaelchiti/5575309 It has details ans explanation. But find below more details if you need them.

The approach is based on adding a namespace to the already known rake tasks db:migrate, db:create, db:drop and perform those tasks with a different database. And then in adding a base active record (AR) class for connecting based on the configuration of the new database.yml file. This way you don't need to hack around the migrations with connection stuff and you get a clean directory structure.

Your structure will end up like this

config
  |- database.yml
  \- another_database.yml (using the same nomenclature of 'development', 'test', etc).

db
  |- migrate (default migrate directory)
  |- schema.rb
  |- seed.rb

another_db
  |- migrate (migrations for the second db)
  |- schema.rb (schema that will be auto generated for this db)
  |- seed.rb (seed file for the new db)

Then in your code you can create a base class and read the config from this new database.yml file and connect to it only on the models that inherit from that AR base class. (example in the gist).

Best!.