rails deploy - database not uploading

Question

I'm working on my first rails app deploy and the database data from my local computer doesn't seem to be getting loaded into the database on the server when I deploy with capistrano. I'm not clear as to whether capistrano takes care of this or not. I have also tried running 'rake db:schema:load' from the /current release directory. Here's the log of what happens when I try to load the app (on the remote webserver) in a browser.

Started GET "/" for XX.XX.XX.XX at 2012-04-04 13:26:46 -0700
  Processing by PagesController#home as HTML
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 3ms

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid (Mysql::Error: Table 'project.users' doesn't exist: SHOW FIELDS FROM `users`):
  app/models/user.rb:61:in `authenticate_with_salt'
  app/helpers/sessions_helper.rb:50:in `user_from_remember_token'
  app/helpers/sessions_helper.rb:13:in `current_user'
  app/helpers/sessions_helper.rb:17:in `signed_in?'
  app/controllers/pages_controller.rb:5:in `home'

So the problem seems to be that the app loads, but the DB isn't populated with tables and data.

I'm sure I'm missing a relatively basic detail of the deployment process, but thus far it escapes me... Any help would be mucho appreciated! Thanks.

Answer 1

What does your Capfile look like?

Neither Rails nor Capistrano will copy data from your development environment to your deployment environment—db:migrate:* and db:schema:* only handle database structure. Before using rake db:schema:load make sure your development environment migrations have been run and your latest db/schema.rb is checked in to your repo.

If you want certain data to be in your database upon deployment look in db/seeds.rb. There are also many gems for seeding database data.