How can I make my local mysql settings match Amazon RDS?

Question

I have a setup where I develop locally using a local mysql instance and then I push my code to AWS, which uses an RDS MySQL instance.

I want to make my local database match RDS settings as closely as possible. I run into configuration problems, where an obvious issue does not exhibit itself in local development, but my tests fail on RDS. For example, one recent issue was that the RDS default charset for tables is latin1 whereas the default settings for brew-installed mysql is UTF-8.

I can solve these problems as they occur, but it would be really useful to do a bulk-setup that configures my local MySQL to match RDS as much as possible.

Is this doable?

Answer 1

Just go into the parameter group you are using in RDS and copy all those settings to your local MySQL server.