I have a model & a table which I no longer need in my App, I could leave them there but I would like to remove them to keep things tidy.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to remove them with out messing around with my migrations & db/schema.rb files & any side effect it could have on my production environment, my app is on Heroku. I'm using PostgreSQL on both my local machine & heroku.
So far I've found two ways to do this but am not sure which is the best method/ rails way?
Method 1
I thought about just going in to my database & dropping the table & then destroying the model.
rails db
DROP TABLE table_name
\q
rails destroy model model_name
If I do this what will happen to the migrations I have for this model/table? I have two migrations for this model, a timestamp_create_modelname & a add_attribute_to_table name.
Also will this method update the db/schema.rb file?
When I push the App to Heroku I suspect the Model will be removed but the table will remain in place, is there a heroku command to drop a table.
Method Two
Another way I read about was to generate a new migration to drop the table & then destroy the model.
rails generate migration drop_tablename
& then update the below file:
db/migrate/timestamp_drop_tablename (updated in responce to Dan Wich's answer below)
class DropTablename < ActiveRecord::Migration
def up
drop_table :tablename
end
def down
create_table :tablename do |t|
t.string :table_column
t.references :anothertable
t.timestamps
end
add_index :tablenames, :anothertable_id
end
end
& then in the terminal:
rake db:migrate
rails destroy model model_name
rake db:migrate
git add .
git commit -m "removed table/model_name"
git push heroku master
heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku restart
This seems to be the best method but what happens to the older migration files? Will they remain & update db/shema every time I run rake db:migrate only to be overridden by db/migrate/timestamp_drop_tablename?
I'm happy to experiment with the second method but would like someone with someone with experience to weigh in & tell me the rails ways for doing this.