deploying rails app with no migrations

Question

I started building my app in PHP but was convinced by some developer friends to change to RoR instead. Since I already had my database structure designed and created in mysql, I never used any rails migrations to create tables; I just created the appropriate models to match the existing database schema.

So, now I am at the point where I want to test deployment and, of course, I have no migrations to rake to recreate the db on, for example, Heroku.

I know that I can simply go back and recreate the database by creating migrations but my app has dozens of tables with hundreds of fields in total.

Is there any way to create a set of migrations based on my existing db schema, or will I just have to knuckle under and build the migrations one by one to recreate the structure via rails' migrations.

Answer 1

Actually, there are some rake tasks to do the work:

rake db:schema:dump     # Create a db/schema.rb file that can be portably used against any DB supported by AR
rake db:schema:load     # Load a schema.rb file into the database

You can run: heroku run rake db:schema:load.