Use schema.rb to quickly build legacy database for testing

Question

I'm currently working on a system that is using two different databases. One of them is new and that's where most things happen, but I'm using an old database from another rails app somewhere else. Therefore I don't have the migrations for the database in my project. However I would like to be able to set up a script on Jenkins which will allow me to set that up so I can do CI. My database.yml file basically looks like this:

default: &default
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
development:
  <<: *default
  database: proj_development
test:
  <<: *default
  database: proj_test
legacy_development:
  <<: *default
  database: legacy_development
legacy_test:
  <<: *default
  database: legacy_test

And I have a schema.rb from the old rails app that looks like this:

ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version => 20140721152610) do 
  create_table "users", :force => true do |t|
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.string   "password",                 :limit => 60
    t.string   "security_token",           :limit => 32
    t.text     "additional_information"
  end

  create_table "email_addresses", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "email"
    t.datetime "verified_at"
    t.string   "status"
  end
end

Is there a way that I can run a command to load that schema and set it so that legacy_test gets built with that schema? Some sort of rake db:schema:load --file=legacy_schema.rb --database=legacy_test

Answer 1

You can specify a custom schema file to load using SCHEMA . So, to create the database defined in the legacy_development environment and load the custom schema use:

rake db:create RAILS_ENV=legacy_development
rake db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=legacy_development SCHEMA=db/legacy_schema.rb