Migrating an RoR app from Ubuntu Feisty to CentOS 5.2 Part 2: Database Migration

Part 2 in a series of 4

In Part 1, I got Phusion Passenger up and running. Now I needed to migrate my database schema across. I use Postgres 8.3, which was not installed on the centos box.

Installing Postgres
I need to make sure postgres is (a) installed and (b) configured.

(a) installing postgres: following steps outlined here.
(b) configuring my database and user: my database settings from database.yml are:

development:
adapter: postgresql
host: localhost
database: deploy_monitor_development
username: deploy_monitor
password: deploy_monitor

test:
adapter: postgresql
host: localhost
database: deploy_monitor_test
username: deploy_monitor
password: deploy_monitor


production:
adapter: postgresql
host: localhost
database: deploy_monitor
username: deploy_monitor
password: deploy_monitor

Because this is a production box, I only need to configure the production database, meaning I only need to add the production user deploy_monitor and the database deploy_monitor.

I followed the instructions from the postgresql site to add a user and create a database.
I also needed to install the following gems:

• postgres (0.7.9.2008.01.28)
• postgres-pr (0.5.1)

to enable Rails to connect to Postgres.

Console Access
A lot of times I need to log into the box and check something via script/console, i.e. to run an ActiveRecord query.
In order to run console, I need to build readline:

(1) Install readline and readline-devel

yum install readline
yum install readline-devel

(2) build/install ruby readline bindings

cd {ruby src}/ext/readline
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

Continued: Part 3, Installing RRD