Monkey's thumb

When working on web apps, it can really useful to be able to load production data into your development environment.

I am a sucker for anything that reduces typing so I put together a mysql_tasks rails plugin for my MySQL backed applications which makes it as easy as

rake mysql:refresh_from_production

Which makes a tar gzipped snapshot of the production database, downloads it into my development box and loads it into my development environment.

If you want to give it a go yourself then read these installation instructions for the mysql_tasks plugin.

This was inspired by the real Nate Clark.