Andrzej's Rails tips #7

Dumping and loading data

Recently, I was in a need to dump data from a sqlite database and load it to a mysql database. There are many ways of doing such a task. One of them is using a plugin released by the Heroku people - YamlDb.

rake db:data:dump
rake db:data:load

You can install it with the following:

script/plugin install http://opensource.heroku.com/svn/rails_plugins/yaml_db

attachment-fu and capistrano

I use attachment-fu for one of my projects. One of the open questions here is how to deal with the files that our users uploaded to the server. I use capistrano 2, and ideally I prefer to have everything automated. The way you can use capistrano to deal with uploaded files is to have a directory which will be shared across different releases (the same as logs).

First, we need to tell attachment-fu that the upload directory is going to be public/uploads. Then, we need to tell Capistrano that public/uploads is going to be a shared directory. Both those things are nicely explained in the following article:

Working with attachment_fu