kbaribeau / good-migrations

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

good_migrations

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.

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:

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

Acknowledgements

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