I need to setup my laptop for ruby development. At the moment I use MAMP Pro for my PHP apps, but now I'm branching out into Rails development I feel that I should get setup correctly.
Are there any advantages to using SQLite rather than MySQL for local developing and then deploying it to a MySQL database? Am I on the right track?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
If you're using MySQL for your application, you should use MySQL for development. Although SQLite is a very robust platform considering the tiny footprint it has, there are significant differences in how the two platforms work and applications written for one are not automatically portable to the other.
If SQLite does everything you need, you can even deploy with it. In some instances it is actually a much more convenient database platform since you can ship a .sqlite3 file over wholesale instead of having to do a potentially frustrating dump/import cycle.
We typically do development using sqlite3, and deploy to mysql on production, just as you are suggesting. The advantage is speed of development, especially when running unit and functional tests.
Ryan Bates also suggests this.