heroku

Using the Heroku Shared Database with Sinatra and Active Record

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ActiveRecord is an amazing (mostly) database-agnostic ORM framework and so it’s a natural choice to use with non-Rails frameworks such as Sinatra. Note that I’ll be using sqlite3 locally but the Heroku Shared Database is a Postgres database so I’ll be setting my environments appropriately. In this post I’ve assumed that you have a Sinatra app that is working locally and on Heroku. Getting it working locally First up you’ll need a few extra gems in your Gemfile, once again note that I’m using different databases in development, test and production environments. [code language=”ruby”] source ‘http://rubygems.org’ gem ‘sinatra’ gem ‘activerecord’ gem ‘sinatra-activerecord’ # excellent gem that ports ActiveRecord for Sinatra group :development, :test do gem ‘sqlite3’ end group :production do gem ‘pg’ # this gem is required to use postgres on Heroku end [/code] Don’t forget that you’ll need to install the gems using bundler. [code language=”bash”] bundle install [/code] And …

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“Dropping” a mongohq database on Heroku

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I’ve used inverted commas around the word ‘dropping’ because it doesn’t look like you can drop a mongohq database – what you can do however is drop all the collections in the database. I was doing this through the add-on interface in heroku but that got tired quickly, and after some googling it looked like the solution was to write a custom rake task and drop it into lib/tasks/; the file can be named anything with a ‘.rb’ extension. The code follows: [code language=”ruby”] namespace :mdb do desc ‘Drops all the collections for the database for the current Rails.env’ task :drop => :environment do if ENV[‘MONGOHQ_URL’] uri = URI.parse(ENV[‘MONGOHQ_URL’]) conn = Mongo::Connection.from_uri(ENV[‘MONGOHQ_URL’]) DB = conn.db(uri.path.gsub(/^\//, ”)) DB.collections.each do |collection| begin collection.drop rescue puts "Can’t drop: " + collection.name end end end end end [/code] Note that the exception handler isn’t perfect and essentially all I’m doing is skipping the system collections …

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