til/rails/alphabetize-schema-columns-to-keep-them-consistent.md

Alphabetize Schema Columns To Keep Them Consistent

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.