Question

I have a Rails 3.1.x app and need to manipulate the data in it’s database via another straight ruby app. Essentially I am just retrieving data from a model in the database.

Obviously it would start off with something like:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter => 'mysql2',
  :encoding => 'utf8',
  :database => 'database_name',
  :username => 'username',
  :password => 'password',
  :host => 'hostname'
)

But where do I go from here with models already set up? Do I import the schema.rb or models?

Would appreciate a more comprehensive use case example of getting a db used in Rails into a standard ruby script.

Answer 1

Rails has rake and script/runner. Both can make it easy to access your models and transparently connect to the database.

I’ve used script/runner when I was retrieving data files from a remote host and needed to insert it into my database underneath the Rails front-end. It worked very nicely.

Read through some of these Stack Overflow questions for more info:

• script/runner
• rake tasks