Create a new environment in Rails

Question

I am not an experienced Rails developer, developing a Rails v2.3 application with MySQl v5.1 .

I am not sure how to achieve the following thing:

I need to create:

1. A new environment (that's a new environment besides development, production and test environments) named 'special' environment

2. A new database environment for above created special environment , what I did is to add the following thing in config/database.yml

special:
   adapter: mysql2
   host: localhost
   username: 
   database: special_db
   encoding: latin1

3. A rake task to run under the special environment and the code in the rake task only deal with the special database.

To achieve this, I know I need to define some configurations, but not sure:

1. What/How exactly are needed to configure to create the special environment & database?

   (As you saw above, I only defined the special database in database.yml file, but where & how to define and configuration for the new enverionment?)

2. How to run the rake task code under the special environment and only deal with the special database in Rails. Could someone please

P.S.

I need to run everything in a rake task not from command line. How to change environment and how to check the change?

--------------Found reason, but not sure the solution---------------------

Ok, I found the reason of this wired problem is because of the mysql2 gem which seems can not load the new "special" environment, if I switch to use mysql gem , the problem will be gone. But this probject has to use mysql2 for some other reason. How to get rid of this mysql2 problem?

Answer 1

Try the following:

Copy the config/environments/development.rb to config/environments/special.rb

Create the database using

 $ RAILS_ENV=special rake db:create
 $ RAILS_ENV=special rake db:migrate
 $ RAILS_ENV=special rails s

Answer 2

Put this into your rake task:

RAILS_ENV = 'special'