Update 12/26/2008: I switched standalone migrations to use a Rakefile instead of a Ruby script.
In my work managing websites I end up working in Ruby, Java, and PHP. In everything but Rails managing the schema requires rolling your own solution. As a result I’ve started using Rails migrations in non-Rails projects to manage the schema. It’s not much code but I figured others might benefit from it so I created a little Github project called standalone migrations.
It’s based on Lincoln Stoll’s blog post titled Stand-alone ActiveRecord migrations and David Welton’s blog post titled Using Migrations Outside of Rails.
Assuming you have Ruby and Gem installed on your machine, here’s how to use it:
gem install -y activerecord rake mysql wget http://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations/zipball/master (or fetch it using git) unzip it, and mv to something like my_non_rails_project/db cd my_non_rails_project/db/ (or wherever you put it) cp config/database_sample.yml config/database.yml vi config/database.yml ./new_migration some_user_story vi migrations/*_some_user_story.rb rake db:migrate (this applies your newly created migration)
