Rails Ruby on Rails

Took me a while to hunt this one down but after installing Rails 3 I was getting a big dump when I attempted to do a "rake db:create" using sqlite3.

$ rake db:create (in /c/src/me/test) could not open database: unable to open database file
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.2.5/lib/sqlite3/errors.rb:62: in check'<br/> /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.2.5/lib/sqlite3/database.rb:7 7:ininitialize'
... Couldn't create database for {"adapter"=>"sqlite3", "database"=>"db/development.
sqlite3", "pool"=>5, "timeout"=>5000}
db/development.sqlite3 already exists

Seems this is a pretty common error and most people chalk it up to permissions or something like that. Turns out under Windows/Cygwin this has nothing to do with permissions but rather the fact the current directory is reported as /c/src/test instead of "c:\src\test". This is true whether you run rake from the Cygwin bash shell or if you start a cmd.exe ...

By editing my config/database.yml file and specifying fully qualified (DOS-style) paths, I'm able to get rake to create the databases (and migrate now works, etc.).

Editing /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.2.5/lib/sqlite3/database.rb I dropped in a "puts file_name" and it looks like it's getting the Cygwin-style path instead of the DOS-style one...

$ rake db:create (in /c/src/me/test) /c/src/me/test could not open database: unable to open database file

And further it appears FileUtils::pwd() returns the same (I haven't dug in but I'm guessing this may be the root cause).

I'm not sure if this is a bug or feature, but it might be worth annotating the appropriate documentation for users utilizing Cygwin under Windows (those of us unfortunate enough not to be using our Macs or Linux boxes at the moment).