Rails deployment workflow: Test locally a production bugfix before pushing

Question

I'm missing something here.

I just fixed a bug on the production state of my app. When I merge it to my development state, it works very well (locally and remotely).

But I really don't know how to get my local machine to my production state, since the db state has changed since then.

Which means I'm about to push to staging a modif I haven't even tested locally.

What's the best practice in this situation?

• To have multiple local db states by creating more local environments?
• To rollback my db to the previous state? (How?)
• To reset my local environment accordingly?
• To "save" the db state when push to staging/prod to be able to restore when in this situation?
• Anything else?

Feels like this should be routine for every app manager, but I really can't see how to deal with this, and find rails migrations not so handy at the moment...

Thanks

Answer 1

To get your local database to the same structure as what you have in production:

First get a local checkout of the branch or tag that's deployed to production.

rake db:test:prepare
rake test # or rake spec

That should clean out your test database, and then recreate it according to your db/schema.rb, which should be the same schema you have in prod. Assuming that you first wrote a failing test, then fixed the bug and watched the test pass, your tests should now be passing.