Normally in rails you would configure a production, test and development database in the database.yml file. If some of your rails data comes from a different database you can configure it in database.yml as well. For example I wanted two rails applications to synchronize their databases occassionally.
To do this I created a remote db in one of the rails application that looks like this in database.yml:
remotedb:
adapter: mysql
database: remote_rails
username: remote_user
password: remote_pwd
host: remote server
Inside the script that is executed by script/runner I did the following to access the new db.
admin_cfg=Rails::Configuration.new.database_configuration["remotedb"]
if remote_cfg.nil?
raise “admindb is not configured. Cannot pull data from admin db.”
end
dbh = Mysql.real_connect(remote_cfg["host"], remote_cfg["username"], remote_cfg["password"], remote_cfg["database"])
Now use ruby’s mysql library to work with dbh
