ProductionModels

Easily access your data in the production database from the console.

Ever wanted to take a peek in the production data while developing, or to transfer data from one database to the other? With ProductionModels, you can use the same classes to access both databases simultaneously.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'production_models'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install production_models

Once loaded, remember to load the class with:

require 'production'

(that's right, just production and not production_models)

There are two forms for accessing your production database:

1. Prepend Production:: to your model's class and you're accessing the production database (quicker but has caveats, see section below)

2. Use Production.wrap(ModelClass) to call ModelClass methods on the production database (slower to type and execute, but safer)

You can specify any other connection defined in config/database.yml by calling Production.connection = :connection_name or by passing a database URI, just as you would with ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection because, well, that's what happens behind the scenes. By default, you're accessing the database configured in the production section of the configuration file.

In addition you can sync tables between environments with

Production.push_from_development(ModelClass, AnotherModelClass, YetAnotherModelClass)

and similarly with

Production.pull_to_development(ModelClass, AnotherModelClass, YetAnotherModelClass)

The destination tables will be truncated, so please be super-duper careful when you use these.

The namespace approach does some metaprogramming magic to do its dirty job, which works fine if your models are in the main namespace (i.e. they live in app/models), but can lead to unpredictable results if your models are namespaced. In particular, if you have a situation where you have

class SomeClass < ActiveRecord::Base
  class SomeOtherClass < ActiveRecord::Base
  end
end

then Production::SomeClass::SomeOtherClass will not point to the production database, but instead to the development database! This happens because Ruby resolves namespaces from left to right and I couldn't figure out a way to trigger a const_missing on a constant that's actually there. In this case, you'll have to use Production.wrap(SomeClass::SomeOtherClass) and you'll get a class that will point to the right database.

If you have a solution for this, feel free to patch it on. ;-)

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request