Ruby-on-rails – Rails DB Migration – How To Drop a Table

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I added a table that I thought I was going to need, but now no longer plan on using it. How should I remove that table?

I've already run migrations, so the table is in my database. I figure rails generate migration should be able to handle this, but I haven't figured out how yet.

I've tried:

rails generate migration drop_tablename

but that just generated an empty migration.

What is the "official" way to drop a table in Rails?

Best Answer

You won't always be able to simply generate the migration to already have the code you want. You can create an empty migration and then populate it with the code you need.

You can find information about how to accomplish different tasks in a migration here:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Migration.html

More specifically, you can see how to drop a table using the following approach:

drop_table :table_name

Related Solutions

Ruby-on-rails – How to write a migration to rename an ActiveRecord model and its table in Rails

Here's an example:

class RenameOldTableToNewTable < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    rename_table :old_table_name, :new_table_name
  end

  def self.down
    rename_table :new_table_name, :old_table_name
  end
end

I had to go and rename the model declaration file manually.

Edit:

In Rails 3.1 & 4, ActiveRecord::Migration::CommandRecorder knows how to reverse rename_table migrations, so you can do this:

class RenameOldTableToNewTable < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    rename_table :old_table_name, :new_table_name
  end 
end

(You still have to go through and manually rename your files.)

Ruby-on-rails – Rails migrations: Undo default setting for a column

Rails 5+

def change
  change_column_default( :table_name, :column_name, from: nil, to: false )
end

Rails 3 and Rails 4

def up
  change_column_default( :table_name, :column_name, nil )
end

def down
  change_column_default( :table_name, :column_name, false )
end