How do you deal with breaking changes in a Rails migration?
- by Adam Lassek
Let's say I'm starting out with this model:
class Location < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :company_name, :location_name
end
Now I want to refactor one of the values into an associated model.
class CreateCompanies < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :companies do |t|
t.string :name, :null => false
t.timestamps
end
add_column :locations, :company_id, :integer, :null => false
end
def self.down
drop_table :companies
remove_column :locations, :company_id
end
end
class Location < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :location_name
belongs_to :company
end
class Company < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :locations
end
This all works fine during development, since I'm doing everything a step at a time; but if I try deploying this to my staging environment, I run into trouble.
The problem is that since my code has already changed to reflect the migration, it causes the environment to crash when it attempts to run the migration.
Has anyone else dealt with this problem? Am I resigned to splitting my deployment up into multiple steps?
