testdouble/ good-migrations

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testdouble

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Description

Prevent Rails from auto-loading app/ code when running database migrations

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good_migrations

Name: good-migrations
Brand: good-migrations
SKU: //testdouble/good-migrations
Rating: 2.35 (240 reviews)

This gem prevents Rails from auto-loading app code while it's running migrations, preventing the common mistake of referencing ActiveRecord models from migration code.

Usage

Add good_migrations to your Gemfile:

gem 'good_migrations'

And you're done! That's it.

Prerequisites

This gem requires that your app uses either of these autoloader strategies:

The classic
```
ActiveSupport::Dependencies
```
autoloader (e.g.
```
config.autoloader
= :classic
```
), which is going away with Rails 7
Version 2.5 or higher of the Zeitwerk autoloader (e.g.
```
config.autoloader =
:zeitwerk
```
) If your app uses an earlier version of zeitwerk, you'll see a warning every time
```
db:migrate
```
is run

Background

Over the life of your Ruby on Rails application, your app's models will change dramatically, but according to the Rails guides, your migrations shouldn't:

In general, editing existing migrations is not a good idea. You will be creating extra work for yourself and your co-workers and cause major headaches if the existing version of the migration has already been run on production machines. Instead, you should write a new migration that performs the changes you require.

That means that if your migrations reference the ActiveRecord model objects you've defined in

app/models

, your old migrations are likely to break. That's not good.

By adding this gem to your project's

Gemfile

, autoloading paths inside

'app/'

while running any of the

db:migrate

Rake tasks will raise an error, explaining the dangers inherent.

Some will reply, "who cares if old migrations are broken? I can still run

rake
db:setup

because I have a

db/schema.rb

file". The problem with this approach is that, so long as some migrations aren't runnable, the

db/schema.rb

can't be regenerated from scratch and its veracity can no longer be trusted. In practice, we've seen numerous projects accumulate cruft in

db/schema.rb

as the result of erroneous commits to work-in-progress migrations, leading to the development and test databases falling out of sync with production. That's not good!

For more background, see the last section of this blog post on healthy migration habits

Options

There's no public API to this gem. If you want to work around its behavior, you have a few options:

Run the command with the env var
```
GOOD_MIGRATIONS=skip
```
Explicitly
```
require
```
the app code you need in your migration
Remove the gem from your project

Acknowledgements

Credit for figuring out where to hook into the ActiveSupport autoloader goes to @tenderlove for this gist.

Caveats

Because this gem works by monkey-patching the ActiveSupport auto-loader, it will not work if your Rails environment (development, by default) is configured to eager load your application's classes (see: config.eager_load).