On Aug 5, 2007, at 18:58 , Perry Smith wrote:
I find it odd that you are resistant to the idea. To me, the
advantages are clear if it can be done without a tremendous amount
of work. Why horse around with the environment variables to set
such things as password, call sh, just to call pg_dump.
My resistance was to the idea that creating a connection through
ActiveRecord was preferable to a system call.
I believe that pg_dump/psql are only required if you're using
config.active_record.schema_format = :sql. (I may be mistaken, as I
exclusively use schema_format = :sql so any other possible dependents
are already satisfied.)
When using config.active_record.schema_format = :sql, pg_dump and
psql pretty much need to be in your path. And if psql is already in
your path, psql can be used with the -c flag to run arbitrary
commands (such as CREATE/DROP DATABASE and also CREATE ROLE), so
createdb and dropdb are not really necessary for most purposes. Of
course, you still need a database to connect to. Personally, I don't
want to put postgres/template1 connection information in database.yml
for security reasons: these commands are not run very often and a
great way to keep information secure is to not have it available.
Personally I wish Rails did not include database.yml by default as I
think it's much too easy to load it into an SCM repository. I use a
custom rake task to set up the Rails application to take care of this
as well as other details, including database and role creation. (This
is especially helpful for running tests.)
If you're not using config.active_record.schema_format = :sql, then
perhaps pg_dump and psql are not required, and they aren't
necessarily in your path. In that case it might make sense to use
ActiveRecord for CREATE/DROP DATABASE as you aren't necessarily going
to have psql otherwise in your path. However, in this case in my
opinion it's better for the above-mentioned security reasons not to.
Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net
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