How to Setup a Readonly Rails Console

In an effort to better protect our production data, last year we choose to setup a readonly production console. This allows developers to poke around production data without having to worry that they might accidentally change something they shouldn't. In this post, I will break down exactly what we did in order to accomplish this for our Ruby on Rails application.Before I dive into the specifics for each database, I want to first mention that we use a completely separate server for console access. Using a separate server allows us to tweak application settings in order to achieve readonly access. In order to deploy these changes we use Ansible. When Ansible runs a deploy it looks for the console box tag to know what settings and configs need to be deployed to that particular box.