Friday, February 11, 2011

ActiveRecord migrations without Rails

I spend a lot of time working with data from partners that comes in various forms from Excel spreadsheets to archive files with field descriptions.  It is always a pain to work with this data but one thing I have been doing lately is creating databases for the data that live outside of our application.  This way I can manage frequent updates and apply transformations to the data before it is loaded into our production database.

I used to do this with sql files and had a numbering scheme but what I really wanted were ActiveRecord migrations without a full blown Rails application.  Since it is just a single database I didn't need all of the typical rake tasks but I did create the following Rakefile:


The following tasks are available:
wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake -T
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)
rake db:create    # Create the database from config/database.yml for the current DATABASE_ENV
rake db:drop      # Drops the database for the current DATABASE_ENV
rake db:migrate   # Migrate the database (options: VERSION=x, VERBOSE=false).
rake db:rollback  # Rolls the schema back to the previous version (specify steps w/ STEP=n).
rake db:version   # Retrieves the current schema version number

Instead of defining RAILS_ENV you instead define DATABASE_ENV.  To specify where the migrations live you can override the default of db/migrate with MIGRATIONS_DIR.  Just like with rails you define config/database.yml for database connection information.
wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> cat config/databases.yml 
development:
  adapter: mysql
  user: root
  password:
  database: autism_speaks_dev
  host: localhost
  logger: false

An example run for this database shows usage and results are just like one would expect in a full blown rails environment:
wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake db:create
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)
wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake db:version
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)
Current version: 0
wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake db:migrate
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)
==  CreateLoadedProviders: migrating ==========================================
-- create_table(:loaded_providers)
   -> 0.1285s
==  CreateLoadedProviders: migrated (0.1288s) =================================

wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake db:version
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)
Current version: 1
wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake db:rollback
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)
==  CreateLoadedProviders: reverting ==========================================
-- drop_table(:loaded_providers)
   -> 0.0023s
==  CreateLoadedProviders: reverted (0.0024s) =================================

wesbailey@feynman:~/autism_data> rake db:drop
(in /Users/wesbailey/autism_data)

20 comments:

  1. Amazing post Wes! I´m starting with Rails and didn´t know Rake was so cool. To understand your code i had to research a little though. :)
    Thanks and keep the good work!

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  2. Thanks Bernardo! Glad you found this useful.

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  3. Nice tip here. The API is easy to use, and Rake should be familiar to even a novice Rubyist, but it's nice to have quick references like this lying around. Thanks!

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  4. You are welcome Seth! I was frustrated with the lack of info out there on how to do this. Now it is there for everyone.

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  5. I'm doing the same sort of thing with scripts and running them at the command line. Using Rake seems smart, I'm going to try that next.

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  6. Have a look at standalone migrations on github which does just that:

    https://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations

    we can always use more contributors!

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  7. @Todd I forked your project and added to it and issued a pull request. Review it if you are interested.

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  8. A post on stack overflow here:

    http://stackoverflow.com/a/9450343/365798

    specifically for the use of activerecord + sinatra + JRuby + postgresql

    with JRuby you need to make sure you've got the right activerecord gem adapter "activerecord-jdbcpostgresql-adapter"

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  9. Do you know why i keep getting the error:
    private method `create_database' called for #?

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  10. Perfect, just what I needed for a small data analysis project!

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  11. Thank you, I am using this. Also, thanks for your work on Autism Speaks.

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  12. Thank you so much for this post. It helped me immensely setting up a no-Rails app with PostgreSQL, especially those migration rake tasks.

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