Rails: Alter migrations during early development phases

Question

During the very early phases of development in a Rails app, I prefer to modify the migrations files directly to add new columns (fields) to my tables (models) instead of piling up migrations to alter fields and/or do minor changes.

Is that possible in Rails?

Answer 1

Presumably the fact that you are doing it indicates that it's possible!

Answer 2

I run the following commands to solve this problem. Save it in a script and you are ready to go! Of course, this presumes that losing the data is fine. Loading the fixtures is easy enough to add to this script in any case.

#!/bin/sh
rake db:drop
rake db:create
rake db:migrate --trace

PS: My friend who gave me this idea calls this script rake_dance :)

Answer 3

I recommend using fixtures when taking this approach (as it allows quickly recreating sample data for the application after dropping the database to recreate). Another option is http://datamapper.org/ (does not require migrations).

Answer 4

Cleanest solution, driven from Vijay Dev's solution is to create a rake task:

namespace :db do
  desc "Drops, recreates and seeds the database."
  task :reload => [:drop, :create, :migrate, :seed] do
    Rake::Task['db:drop'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:create'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:migrate'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:seed'].invoke
  end
end