Connect To App Database With `dbconsole`

For about as long as I've been a Rails developer, I've been comfortable with the command line and Postgres tooling. Because of that, whenever I've needed to connect to a local or remote database, I typically invoke psql directly.

❯ psql still_development
psql (18.4)
Type "help" for help.

::1 postgres@still_development=#

Because of that, I somehow completely missed the existence of dbconsole. It's a Rails command that will look at your database adapter and database config for the relevant environment and connect you directly to the database.

❯ bin/rails dbconsole
psql (18.4)
Type "help" for help.

::1 postgres@still_development=#

When it sees that your app is using the Postgres adapter, it is going to: - Use the values from config/database.yml for the current environment to set env vars like PGHOST, PGUSER, etc. - Invoke the psql it finds on your path which will pick up those env vars

I can also use this to connect to an app's database in a remote environment, e.g. my staging env. Because I don't have actually staging values set in config/database.yml, I would first need to ssh onto that remote server, load the env, and then run bin/rails dbconsole.