# Documentation for database.yml?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/documentation-for-database-yml/169318>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [June 2, 2009, 9:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/documentation-for-database-yml/169318 "2009-06-02T09:33:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![derek73](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/9fc348/32.png) [@derek73](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/derek73)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2009, 9:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/documentation-for-database-yml/169318/1 "2009-06-02T09:33:13Z")

</div>

can anyone point me to the documentation for the database.yml file?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![derek73](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/9fc348/32.png) [@derek73](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/derek73)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2009, 5:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/documentation-for-database-yml/169318/2 "2009-06-02T17:39:40Z")

</div>

derek73 wrote:

> can anyone point me to the documentation for the database.yml file?

I’m guessing your difficulty in finding documentation for the  
database.yml file is that it’s contents depend on what database adaptor  
is being used.

For example, here’s the documentation for an oracle-enhanced adaptor  
from GitHub:  
[http://wiki.github.com/rsim/oracle-enhanced/usage](http://wiki.github.com/rsim/oracle-enhanced/usage)

I’m not sure if there exists any generic documentation on this  
configuration file. What I generally do is to just create a new Rails  
project using whatever adaptor I plan to use. Then I just modify the  
database.yml file that gets generated, if necessary.

But, you may still need to look for any documentation for the specific  
adaptor you’re planning to use.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![derek73](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/9fc348/32.png) [@derek73](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/derek73)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2009, 5:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/documentation-for-database-yml/169318/3 "2009-06-02T17:53:26Z")

</div>

Note that YAML is just a collection of serialized objects. So each  
adapter can use a completely different object for initialization.  
Maybe this is obvious but as a new rails developer this didn’t click  
in place for me until I had to bring a DB online for testing a plugin.