# Strategy Help -- Moving from Development to Production

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strategy-help-moving-from-development-to-production/144442>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 29, 2008, 6:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strategy-help-moving-from-development-to-production/144442 "2008-07-29T18:38:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Daniel\_Hirsch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/c89c15/32.png) [@Daniel\_Hirsch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Daniel_Hirsch)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2008, 6:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strategy-help-moving-from-development-to-production/144442/1 "2008-07-29T18:38:09Z")

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Hello everyone,

I apologize if I’m missing a really obvious resource for this – I’ve  
looked and haven’t found anything.

I’m working my way through my first real Rails application, and so  
far, have spent all of my time in Development mode. We’re pretty close  
to launching (at least as an alpha version of the site), and I’m  
totally in the dark about the best way to go about moving into  
production database-wise.

There are tons of resources on getting your server running – I have  
that covered. What I don’t really know is what to do with the  
database. Is it best to start the Production database from scratch and  
load everything into it? I have a fair bit of data from testing in my  
development database, and wouldn’t mind having that move over to  
production. How kosher is that? Is there a particular accepted  
strategy for this?

To go one step further, since we’ll be continuously developing the  
application, when I am ready to upgrade the production environment, do  
I simply run any of the outstanding migrations on it?

I feel like I’m missing some big, giant, obvious answer, and if there  
is a lot written about this, I would be eternally grateful if someone  
would point me in that direction.

Thanks,

Dan

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Daniel\_Hirsch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/c89c15/32.png) [@Daniel\_Hirsch](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Daniel_Hirsch)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2008, 8:27pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strategy-help-moving-from-development-to-production/144442/2 "2008-07-29T20:27:10Z")

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> development database, and wouldn’t mind having that move over to  
> production. How kosher is that? Is there a particular accepted  
> strategy for this?

Hard to say without knowing how “testy” your test data is. If you  
make the decision to do a one time import of that data because it’s  
_good_ data, I don’t see a problem that that. I wouldn’t get in the  
habit of migrating data from development to production though. That’s  
just asking for trouble.

If it were me, I prefer a production setup to start from scratch with  
all the necessary import scripts to get whatever seed data into the  
database necessary – never relying on anything in development/test/  
stage/etc.

> To go one step further, since we’ll be continuously developing the  
> application, when I am ready to upgrade the production environment, do  
> I simply run any of the outstanding migrations on it?

Yes. After QA of course. Look into Capistrano. It will make things  
easier and you’ll find more information on managing the release process.

-philip