Running DB Migrations from application

Question

I have a rails application where each user has a separate database. (taking Joel Spolsky's advice on this). I want to run DB migrations from the rails application to create a new database and tables for this user.

What is the easiest way to do this?

Maybe the db migration is not the best for this type of thing. Thanks!

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It would be nice if it could be a completely automated process. The following process would be ideal.

1. A user signs up on our site to use this web app
2. Migrations are run to create this users database and get tables setup correctly

Is there a way of calling a rake task from a ruby application?

Answer 1

To answer part of your question, here's how you'd run a rake task from inside Rails code:

require 'rake'
load 'path/to/task.rake'

Rake::Task['foo:bar:baz'].invoke

Mind you, I have no idea how (or why) you could have one database per user.

Answer 2

We use seperate configuration files for each user. So in the config/ dir we would have roo.database.yml which would connect to my personal database, and I would copy that over the database.yml file that is used by rails.

We were thinking of expanding the rails Rakefile so we could specify the developer as a environment variable, which would then select a specfic datbase configuration, allowing us to only have one database.yml file. We haven't done this though as the above method works well enough.

Answer 3

Actually I have discovered a good way to run DB migrations from an application:

ActiveRecord::Migrator.migrate("db/migrate/")