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54 CHAPTER 3 Developing a real Rails application
For example, if you want to use PostgreSQL, you change the settings to read like the
following listing. It’s common convention, but not mandatory, to call the environment’s
database [app_name]_[environment].
Listing 3.7 config/database.yml
development:
adapter: postgresql
database: ticketee_development
username: root
password: t0ps3cr3t
You’re welcome to change the database if you wish. Rails will go about its business. It’s
good practice to develop and deploy on the same database system to avoid strange
behavior between two different systems. Systems such as PostgreSQL perform faster
than SQLite, so switching to it may increase your application’s performance. Be mindful,
however, that switching database systems doesn’t automatically switch your data
over for you.
It’s generally wise to use different names for the different database environments
because if you use the same database in development and test, the database will be
emptied of all data when the tests are run, eliminating anything you may have set up
in development mode. You should never work on the live production database
directly unless you are absolutely sure of what you’re doing, and even then extreme
care should be taken.
Finally, if you’re using MySQL, it’s wise to set the encoding to utf8 for the database,
using this setup in the config/database.yml file:
development:
adapter: mysql2
database: ticketee_development
username: root
password: t0ps3cr3t
encoding: utf8
This way, the database is set up automatically to work with UTF-8 (UCS Transformation
Format–8-bit), eliminating any potential encoding issues that may be encountered
otherwise.
That’s database configuration in a nutshell. Now we look at how to use a preprepared
stylesheet to make an application look prettier than its unstyled brethren.
3.1.5 Applying a stylesheet
So that your application looks good as you’re developing it, we have a pre-prepared
stylesheet you can use to style the elements on your pages. You can download the
stylesheet from http://github.com/rails3book/ticketee/raw/master/app/assets/
stylesheets/application.css and put it in the app/stylesheets directory. By default, your
Rails application includes this stylesheet; you can configure it in the app/views/
layouts/application.html.erb file using this line: