The current project I'm working on is not using Ruby on Rails, but I still want to use ActiveRecord Migrations for the database changes.
There are some options out there for this, and most people that I read about and had this issue just use the activerecord gem and set up their rake tasks.
I don't want to write my own rake tasks, since I feel that I would be reinventing the wheel. So what did I do? I created a new rails application, and stripped it down, removing everything that is not needed to run the migrations.
First, I created a rails application called 'deploy' on the root folder of the application with:
rails new deploy
Then, I removed all the directories in the deploy folder, except for these:
- config
- db
- lib
- log
- script
So far so good. The only uncomfortable thing now is that I have to enter to the deploy directory to run bundle install or rake db:migrate. To solve this issue, I did the following:
I added this Gemfile to the root directory of the application:
source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'git-deploy'
gemfile = File.open(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'deploy', 'Gemfile'))
eval gemfile.read
And this Rakefile as well:
rakefile = File.open(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'deploy', 'Rakefile'))
eval rakefile.read.gsub(/config/, 'deploy/config')
task :generate do
arguments = ARGV.find { |a| a.start_with?('GENERATE=') }
arguments = arguments.split('=')[1] unless arguments.nil?
sh "cd deploy; rails generate #{arguments}" unless arguments.nil? or arguments.empty?
end
db_tasks_file = File.open(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'deploy', 'lib', 'tasks', 'db.rb'))
db_tasks = db_tasks_file.read
namespace :db do
namespaces = [:test, :production]
namespaces.each do |name|
namespace name do
eval db_tasks.gsub(/{environment}/, name.to_s)
end
end
end
This is the lib/tasks/db.rb being included in the Rakefile:
tasks = [:create, :drop, :migrate, :rollback, :version, :seed, :setup]
tasks.each do |name|
task name do
sh "rake db:#{name.to_s} RAILS_ENV={environment}"
end
end
As you can see I added some rake dynamic tasks to manage the migrations in the development, test and production environments from the root directory of the application.
Now, I can run bundle install and rake whatever from my usual working directory.
That's all folks!
