My higher level objective is to develop a way to move particular
database entries from my development platform to my staging platform and
then to my production platform. Unfortunately, there may be reasons to
go the other way as well. And, these entries have “owners” and also are
interconnected. So, not only does Foo have a belongs_to :user in it, it
also has has_many :dogs, etc. Thus most fields will just move over but
the id fields and the foreign keys will change.
One approach is some outside SQL process.
A second approach is to have sever 1 contact server 2 via ActiveResource
to move the records over. I’ve not used ActiveResource before. It
would seem to be easier to do that if server 1 could contact server 2 on
behalf of the current user instead of a specific “admin” user. That is
mostly what I’m asking with this email: is that possible and if so, can
you point me to the documentation on how to do it?
A third approach would be to tell ActiveRecord to open a new database
connection to the other server and move the records that way.
If anyone has any other suggested approaches, that would be great as
well.
I have two production servers - linux server A, and linux server B.
I have one development windows box - dev box C.
All three use MySql for database handling.
I have putty installed locally.
The first thing I do is I set the port for dev box C to something other
than 3306. In this case my dev box C can act as the staging server. I
set the port to 3400. Server A is the server I want the new data to go
to and Server B houses the data I want to retrieve.
I open Putty and go to tunnelling and activate it with SSH. I open
Server B with Putty and now tunnelling is active. At this point, if I
open an instance of MySql with port 3306 it will locally connect to
Server B securely through SSH. This allows you to not use remote DB
handlers. At the same time, I have port 3400 open as a connection with
MySql. I now can operate two database instances simultaneously.
From here, you can do quite a few things. You could easily send
development data to the localhost:3306 connection from localhost:3400
using Rails. You could also use capistrano for performing mysql data
dumps as well: http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1215.