Migrations Outside Rails

I’m about 3 weeks into the rewrite of the Active Record chapters for the new Rails book. In the book, I try to demonstrate Active Record with real, live code. At the same time, I don’t want to run every single piece of code in the context of a Web application. So, I use Active Record stand-alone, without having the rest of Rails loaded. All my demonstration files start:

require "rubygems"
require_gem "activerecord"

and then include a call to establish_connection to connect to the database.

At this point, I’m up and running, and I can play with all the Active Record functionality. But… I still wanted to create tables in the underlying database. In the first edition, I used DDL to do this, but in the second I wanted to use migrations.

My first hack was to use the fact that the various schema definition methods are defined both for migrations and in every database connection object. That let me use the following in my code:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.instance_eval do
  create_table children, :force => true do |t|
    t.column :parent_id, :integer
    t.column :name,      :string
    t.column :position,  :integer
  end
end

I was pretty chuffed with this until Jamis Buck (who else) pointed out a more elegant way:

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table children, :force => true do |t|
    t.column :parent_id, :integer
    t.column :name,      :string
    t.column :position,  :integer
  end
end

As I see more and more people start to use Ruby (and Active Record) as enterprise glue, being able to bring these kinds of Rails goodies to non-Rails applications is a win all around.