How Can I Read the DB Configuration Settings From a Cake Shell?

Question

I would like to write a cake shell to do a nightly backup of my database using mysqldump. I could do this as a shell script, but if I can cram it into a CakePHP shell, then I will get the added benefit of it working across both the development and live server, if I can get it to automagically read my database config settings. I will cron the cake shell and have some peace-of-mind knowing that I have frequent backups of my DB.

In my shell I'm trying to build up a string which starts with "mysqldump --user=" and I'd like to get the username from app/config/database.php. How can I get at the data in database.php?

Answer 1

The following snippet should do the trick:

App::import('Core', 'ConnectionManager');
$dataSource = ConnectionManager::getDataSource('default');
$username = $dataSource->config['login'];