ActiveRecord Without Rails, JDBC-Mssql style

This is a mashup of:

• https://github.com/jwo/ActiveRecord-Without-Rails
• http://exposinggotchas.blogspot.jp/2011/02/activerecord-migrations-without-rails.html

The Gemfile can be configured for a combo of JRuby, JDBC, and Microsoft MSSQL server, as well as for a combo of MRI Ruby (tested on 2.1.2) and SQLite3/Postgres.

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What you can do

Just a simple example of using ActiveRecord migrations without Rails

run rake tasks:

• rake db:create
• rake db:migrate
• rake db:drop
• rake db:rollback
• rake db:version

Or, you can run the thing to show that it'll connect

ruby ar-no-rails

Output:

Count of Pages: 0

Lastly, you can IRB it to do stuff:

$ irb

>> require "./ar-no-rails"
=> true
>> Page.new
=> #<Page id: nil, content: nil, published: false>
>> Page.create content: "the-content"
=> #<Page id: 1, content: "the-content", published: false>

Pre-requisites

For the JRuby/JDBC option, you'll need:

• Java (tested on Java 6)
• JRuby
• A Mssql database server

Note: This project is configured for Rails 3.2.13, because I have to use Java 6 in my current environment. Rails 4.0 would force an upgrade of the JDBC drivers, which require Java 7.

Usage

Getting Started

1. Download the zip file (or git clone)
2. Unzip the archive.
3. rename folder to your project name: mv ActiveRecord-Without-Rails-JDBC-Mssql myproj
4. cd myproj
5. bundle install
6. configure the database in config/database.yml
7. rake db:version # check to see that the db config is correct.
8. rake --tasks make sure everything is working okay

config/database.yml

The database.yml is set up to allow for different environments. By default it has one environment, development defined.

If you define a production environment in the config/database.yml, you can use DATABASE_ENV=production rake db:version to run against the production environment. (this is different from the RAILS_ENV you will see in a lot of Active Record migration documentation because... well, we are not using rails here.)

Alternatives

I haven't checked this out yet, but there is a standalone-migrations gem:

• http://gabrito.com/post/standalone-migrations-using-rails-migrations-in-non-rails-projects
• https://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations