CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyactiverecord
geoffharcourt
geoffharcourt

Reputation: 320

Best practice for gem that creates its own database

I have a gem that I want to be capable of creating its own database (and later making migrations to that database if necessary). The gem uses ActiveRecord when reading and writing to the database. Short of embedding my gem in a non-serving Rails application just to get the necessary rake tasks, is there a best practice or community-promoted method for doing this? Attaching a whole Rails infrastructure to my little command-line only app just to get future migration upgrades seems like way too much overhead.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 419

Answers (2)

Arvicco
Arvicco

Reputation: 36

You can use standalone_migrations gem to manage ActiveRecord environment outside of Rails: https://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations. If you include your migrations or schema into a gem package, consumers of your gem can recreate db structure from scratch. I agree with robbrit that SQLite is the easiest choice for a database.

Upvotes: 1

robbrit
robbrit

Reputation: 17960

You can use DataMapper, which is a relatively lightweight ORM system (compared to ActiveRecord) in combination with an SQLite database. You don't need to use Rails for this, DataMapper drops nicely into a regular app, even something that isn't web-based.

Upvotes: 4

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