in Code Snippets, Hacking

Rails generate both structure.sql and schema.rb

Default behaviour for rails is to generate a db/schema.rb when running migrations or dumping the database.

Schema.rb is great because it can be used for populating other database types and is used to populate the test database.
And I personally think it's great becaus of the vscode plugin Rails Schema which shows the database structure of your application in a sidebar (TIP, move this bar to the right panel).

The rake task db:migrate default behaviour is to invoke a db:schema:dump when migrating is done. By default this generates the schema.rb file.
This output of the generated file is used to popuplate the test-database..

But somethimes the db/schema.rb isn't good enough for popuplating the test database or using the file to generate the basic structure. Contraints are quirky.
(For example see previous article mysql json constraints).
To generate a native sql dump of the database structure, you can change the default structure to sql. Place the following line in your config/application.rb.

    config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

When enabling this dumps are generated to db/structure.sql.
But you loose the schema.rb dumps.

Here's a tip to work with structure.sql and just generate the schema.rb (for your lovely sidebar).

Create a file in lib/tasks/schema_dump.rb and enhance the dump task, so it also creates the schema.rb file.

Rake::Task['db:schema:dump'].enhance do
  File.open(Rails.root.join('db/schema.rb'), 'w') do |stream|
    ActiveRecord::SchemaDumper.dump(ActiveRecord::Base.connection, stream)
  end
end

NOTE: structure.sql contains yet another MySQL bug. (See next article for workaround)
Tip: use postgresql !