Adding an Amazon RDS to your rails application

Introduction#

Steps to create an AWS RDS instance and configure your database.yml file by installing the required connectors.

Consider we are connecting MYSQL RDS with your rails application.

Steps to create MYSQL database

Login to amazon account and select RDS service
Select Launch DB Instance from the instance tab
By defaul MYSQL Community Edition will be selected, hence click the select button
Select the database purpose, say production and click next step
Provide the mysql version, storage size, DB Instance Identifier, Master Username and Password and click next step
Enter Database Name and click Launch DB Instance
Please wait until all the instance gets created. Once the instance gets created you will find an Endpoint, copy this entry point (which is referred as hostname)

Installing connectors

Add the MySQL database adapter to your project’s gemfile,

gem 'mysql2'

Install your added gems,

bundle install

Some other database adapters are,

gem 'pg' for PostgreSQL
gem 'activerecord-oracle_enhanced-adapter' for Oracle
gem 'sql_server' for SQL Server

Configure your project’s database.yml file Open your config/database.yml file

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  encoding: utf8
  database: <%= RDS_DB_NAME %>  # Which you have entered you creating database
  username: <%= RDS_USERNAME %> # db master username
  password: <%= RDS_PASSWORD %> # db master password
  host: <%= RDS_HOSTNAME %>     # db instance entrypoint
  port: <%= RDS_PORT %>         # db post. For MYSQL 3306