branchbot

Save and restore the state of your Rails development and test databases as you work on different branches.

This allows you to make some changes to the structure of your database on a feature branch, then be able to quickly switch back to your master branch to make a hotfix or start a new feature branch with your original database structure and content.

Installation

Install the gem:

gem install branchbot
Download the post-checkout file into the .git/hooks directory of your project. Modify to configure any flags.

Note: Be sure to keep the post-checkout name to match Git's expectations.

Options

--app-root - The app root relative to the project root (default: '.')
--db-config-erb - Interpret database.yml as ERB an template before parsing as YML (default: disabled)

Support

Only PostgreSQL and MySQL databases are currently supported.

Non-Rails Usage

While this hook is geared towards Rails and depends on Ruby, it is very easy to use it in non-Ruby/Rails projects, so long as you have Ruby installed on your system.

This script will look for a config/database.yml file in your app's root (configurable via --app-root), and expects it to look like this:

development:
  adapter: <adapter>
  username: <database username>
  password: <database password>
  database: <database name>

We currently support two adapters: mysql2 and postgresql. We don't actually rely on these gems, but instead use them to determine which database's command line tools we should use (mysqldump/mysql or pg_dump/psql). Use mysql2 if you are using a MySQL database, or postgresql if you are using a PostgreSQL database.