establish_connection

Establishes the connection to the database. Accepts a hash as input where the :adapter key must be specified with the name of a database adapter (in lower-case) example for regular databases (MySQL, Postgresql, etc):

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  adapter:  "mysql",
  host:     "localhost",
  username: "myuser",
  password: "mypass",
  database: "somedatabase"
)

Example for SQLite database:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  adapter:  "sqlite3",
  database: "path/to/dbfile"
)

Also accepts keys as strings (for parsing from YAML for example):

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  "adapter"  => "sqlite3",
  "database" => "path/to/dbfile"
)

Or a URL:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  "postgres://myuser:mypass@localhost/somedatabase"
)

In case ActiveRecord::Base.configurations is set (Rails automatically loads the contents of config/database.yml into it), a symbol can also be given as argument, representing a key in the configuration hash:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:production)

The exceptions AdapterNotSpecified, AdapterNotFound and ArgumentError may be returned on an error.