Rebecca’s Ramblings

So… you’re writing a migration, you think you’ve got it right - time to try it out. You run
rake db:migrate
to apply your migration, and it doesn’t work.

Your database has some of the changes from the migration in it, and the rest aren’t there. How do you get it back into the state it was in before you attempted the migration?

You might think that
rake db:migrate VERSION=nn
(where nn is the migration number before the one that failed)
would do the job, presuming that your failed migration’s self.down method runs the statements to rollback your changes in the same order as the self.up method makes the changes.

Unfortunately, nothing happens. Rails knows it didn’t complete the migration, so has left the current schema version number as at the end of the last migration which did complete.

At this point, you are faced with opening up your database and reverting the changes that did get made manually…

There is, however, a patch in rails-trac to fix this issue - if you are using a database that supports transactions round data definition statements (such as Postgres). Once installed, your migration is wrapped in a transaction, which is rolled back if any errors occur. Yippee!