Cloning your remote database to local with Capistrano

Handy file: Capistrano recipe for cloning your remote (production) mysql database to your local box, and vice versa.

One of the more useful recipes for Capistrano that I've come across is this one by netzpirat. It's designed to give you simple commands that will dump the mysql database on your production server to a file, scp the file back to your development workstation, and import it into your local mysql database in a single operation. Very sexy, very powerful. (It also has commands for doing the reverse, and for uploading/downloading files as well - useful for things like paperclip attachments.)

Unfortunately, for my purposes, it failed right out of the box in two different ways:

It only pulls your database name, db login, and password from your database.yml, and then (on the remote server) tries to connect to the database on a local socket. Most of my databases are hosted on remote boxes.

It assumes your production database credentials exist in your local database.yml, which they really shouldn't in any decent deployment. Especially not if you are hosting your code in an outside repository.

Slightly improved version

So, I created this improved version, which pulls the remote DB credentials from the database.yml file on the remote server (assuming you've put them in #{shared_path}/config/database.yml), and which will also use the hostname, if any, from your database.yml when it executes mysqldump.

Let me know if you have any trouble with it and I'll correct any errors in the gist.