David J Rice

Okay, so say we have a database on our production/qa server that we want to test a coding change against.

What i’d usually do would be to:

svn commit
rake deploy

That’s not really good practice for working in a team, as we don’t want to check in cruft that someone might pick up…. or kill the production server!

Alternatives

• Mirroring data from our remote database to our local copy
• Connect directly to the remote database

Obviously i’m focusing on the second one for now, but i might take a look into the other at some point…. :)

Because of our secure setup, we can’t just connect directly to the database from outside. So….

Enter the tunnel

What we want to do is create a tunnel from our development machine to the remote database. Fire open the command line. I’m assuming you’re using mysql, and it’s on port 3306… just choose a random ephemeral port for the local port.

ssh dave@server.domain.com -L 10293:127.0.0.1:3306

What we’re doing is routing traffic via ssh, through port 10293 on our local machine to mysql on our remote server. If you were successful, a new shell should open to the remote server.

What’s the connection

We can connect to the database by any means we want now, I like to use cocoamysql for browsing, the following snippet from datebase.yml should help configure things,

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: database_name
  username: dave
  password: xxxxxxx
  host: server.domain.com
  port: 10293