One cool thing about Rails is it provides you with so many helper functions and commands, one of these being RAKE.
RAKE is similar to the MAKE compiler command used to build binaries from source, with Rails it's useful when building your apps database.
Database Work
Create Migration
script/generate migration users
This will create a Rails database migration you can use to specify the contents of the users table for instance.
/myapp/db/migrate/001_create_users.rb
Create Database
Once that's defined you can create the database with,
rake db:create
Compile Pending Migrations
Then run any pending database migrations.
rake db:migrate
All of which will build into a schema located at,
/myapp/db/schema.rb
Custom Tasks
You can also write custom RAKE tasks to do other things,
What to put in them
Here's a simple rake task,
task :sayHello do
puts "Hello World"
end
Where to save your Scripts
Simple, in the tasks directory,
/myapp/lib/tasks
e.g.
/myapp/lib/tasks/sayhello.rake
And to Run ?
rake sayHello
Returns...
Hello World
More Info at...
