Trouble with rake db/migrate

I am new to Ruby and RubyOnRails, and am trying to learn textbooks. The specific book that I am referring to at this point in time is "Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce" published by Apress and written by Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine. The book uses Ubuntu Linux. I am also using Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper. I have installed MySQL, ruby, gems, rubyonrails as instructed in the book and everything has installed correctly (or so it seems to me). I am upto chapter 2 where the authors show you how to create a simple authors table with first_name and last_name fields using migrations. Here is the migration script contained in a file called 001_create_authors.rb stored in the ~/projects/emporium/db/migrate directory:

class CreateAuthors < ActiveRecord::Migration   def self.up     create_table :authors do |t|       t.column :first_name, :string       t.column :last_name, :string     end   end

  def self.down     drop_table :authors   end end

When I try to run it by using the following command: rake db/migrate I get one line output as follows: (in /home/bruparel/projects/emporium) And nothing else. Unlike the book which shows the result of migration script running. I am trying to figure out why nothing is happening. The desired outcome is off-course that a table called authors gets created in the emporium_development database (I am using MySQL as instructed in the book and to keep the things as simple as possible).

Here is the database yaml file:

# MySQL (default setup). Versions 4.1 and 5.0 are recommended.

Are you able to login as emporim/hacked? Does it have the permission to create tables? You must grant privelege to create tables.

Do you see schema_info table? What is the version in that table?

Hello Bala, Sorry for the trouble. It was my mistake. The book asks us to type in rake db:migrate Instead of that I was typing rake db/migrate I just did not read the book right. But something puzzles me. How in the world can someone figure out looking at what log what is wrong. The feedback that rake provides on the console does not have any indication of what is wrong. In other words, I am asking if you or someone else can shed some light on how to go about troubleshooting such problems? Thanks again. Regards, Bharat

You need to have a basic understanding of the concepts about Ruby on Rails. It will come with reading books and doing lot of exercises. You learn by doing and making mistakes. Next time around you will know what to watch out for.

I personally take notes from books, blogs etc and maintain a journal for Ruby on Rails. I take printouts of the most important blog postings and save them in a binder for easy reference. I have prinout of all the cheatsheets for quick reference.

This way you will never say "I resolved the same problem few weeks ago, but I dont remember what I did to sove it!" You will be more productive and learn faster.

Log files can give clues to what is wrong. It is not the only thing that will solve all problems.