has_many :thoughts

During the Intro to Rails portion of tonight’s Philly on Rails, a question was raised asking if there was a better way to give Rails your database password, rather then storing it in the database.yml file.

I tried the method below, which seems to work:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: whatever_development
  username: whatever
  password: <%= gets %>
  socket: /tmp/mysql.sock

The first time the database is accessed by Rails, you can simply enter the password at the script/server prompt and you’re in business.

However, I’m not sure how this would work with the -d option on script/server. I imagine it would not work.

Update: PragDave has some thoughts on this, too.