This weekend a fellow member of Rochester On Rails was nice enough to share an invite to Git Hub. Check out my account, I just published two little plugins I use all the time at work and at home when building Rails apps.

The first is Fixture Manager. This plugin adds a few methods to ActiveRecord classes allowing you to save database contents to YAML (either in your test/fixtures folder, or in cms/fixtures). The plugin also provides a few Rake tasks that wrap these methods as well as a simple static class (FixtureManager) giving you two options as to how you want to save and load your data.

The second is Rcov Task. This plugin contains almost no code, its a Rake task that simplifies running your test suite with rcov (and opening your browser if your in Mac OS X).

If you haven’t installed Sake yet, stop whatever it is you’re doing and get it running on your system.

Ok, with that done you’ll probably want some sake tasks to actually make this new tool useful. Below is an updated version of one my favorite tasks.

desc 'Launches the database shell using the values defined in config/database.yml'
task 'db:shell' => [ 'environment' ] do
  config = ActiveRecord::Base.configurations[(RAILS_ENV or "development")]
  command = ""
  case config["adapter"]
  when "mysql" then
    command << "mysql "
    command << "--host=#{(config["host"] or "localhost")} "
    command << "--port=#{(config["port"] or 3306)} "
    command << "--user=#{(config["username"] or "root")} "
    command << "--password=#{(config["password"] or "")} "
    command << config["database"])
  when "postgresql" then
    command << "export PGPASSWORD=#{config["password"]} && " unless config["password"].blank?
    command << "psql "
    command << "-h #{(config["host"])} " unless config ["host"].blank?
    command << "-p #{(config["port"])} ") unless config ["port"].blank?
    command << "-U #{(config["username"])} " unless config["username"].blank?
    command << config["database"]
  when "sqlite3"
    command << "sqlite3 #{config["database"]}"
  else
    command << "echo Unsupported database adapter: #{config["adapter"]}"
  end
  system(command)
end

With the above task you be in any RAILS_ROOT and type sake db:shell and be automatically placed into the appropriate database shell with your username/password/host/port setup already. You can even do sake db:shell RAILS_ENV=production.

I can’t take credit for this task, in fact I originally found it on the Sake Bomb blog post by Err The Blog. The link found in the comments on that page no longer works, but some googling turned up the source code elsewhere. I’ve added Postgres and sqlite3 to the mix as it only supported MySQL originally. If you know who the original author is please let me know as I would like to credit them.