When working on a Rails project with a team, there can be lots of unnecessary
churn in the db/schema.rb file. While there are a couple things that can
cause this churn, the main one is reordering of columns during local migration.
The strong_migrations gem
provides a handy rake task to apply alphabetical ordering to columns
names. This keeps
them in a consistent order which reduces churn.
Assuming you have the strong_migrations gem included in your app, add the
following line to the end of your Rakefile.
task "db:schema:dump": "strong_migrations:alphabetize_columns"This sets strong_migrations:alphabetize_columns as a prerequisite task to
db:schema:dump. Whenever db:schema:dump gets run, the alphabetization task
will get run first. This ensures the resulting db/schema.rb file always has
column names in a consistent order.
The origin of this idea is Paul Gross's blog post Alphabetize schema.rb Columns.