Sinatra can be used to do a number of things. Here at thredUP, we're using Sinatra to turn some of our most used models into services accessible through an internal API. The Sinatra apps that we're building will still connect to our main Rails 3 app's MySQL database, but we'll be able to spin up multiple instances of our most used services which will help us scale as we continue to grow.
We use ActiveRecord for the models we're turning into services so when I was setting up the Sinatra app, I figured a simple Google or StackOverflow search would yield the necessary information I needed to connect the new Sinatra app to the database through ActiveRecord. Nope.
If you're looking to use sqlite3 with ActiveRecord or DataMapper, then this StackOverflow post will be your guide. For those with ActiveRecord and MySQL, here's what you have to do:
Assuming you have the 'active_record' and 'mysql2' gem installed already, all you need to do is create a config file that you require in your main Sinatra .rb file. The contents of the config file are relatively straight forward:
The env variable is important if you have different database settings for production, development, and any other environments. Here is an example of what database.yml might look like:
I know this is simple and easy, but I figure I'm not the first person to have to come across this.
Two other useful Sinatra resources:
