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I am Kent Fenwick, a motivated developer bent on changing the world, one idea at a time

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Jan
16th
Fri
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Super Simple Rails Database Data Dump

So after searching for a long time and trying to become an expert using mysqldump, I have found, yaml_db

yaml_db is the easiest, fastest, most reliable way to transfer your production data to your development database and vice versa.  It runs a rake task that pushes everything into a file called data.yaml, then loads it back into another database using a similiar rake task.

Dump :: rake db:data:dump

Load   :: rake db:data:load

It’s that easy and it works!  

I copied a MySQL production database to my development machine and this worked in all of 5 minutes.  Remember, this is only transferring data, not schema or structure!  This is great, since Rails handles that using migrations.  mysqldump always seems to screw up my structure if I don’t use the right encoding and params, but this works like a charm.

The only trick is that once you dump the data, you will have scp it to your local machine with something like

scp -P [PORT] user@domain:/path/to/railsapp/current/db/data.yml \ /User/local/username

I wrote some capistrano tasks to handle that for me.

That’s it!  Great job Heroku!  Wonderful plugin.