Feature request: allow me to turn off automatic database migrations

[mattbrictson]

This has been discussed in #167, but that PR has since been abandoned. I am moving the discussion here.

Right now capistrano-rails attempts to run database migrations on every deploy. This is undesirable for some applications according to the following comments (see below, copied and pasted from #167).

Ideally capistrano-rails would provide both of these things:

• A way to turn auto-migrations off; and
• A task to trigger a migration manually

Sometimes you may need to run migrations after the actual deploy. For example, if a migration locks the DB, etc. A common case is adding an index to your DB, the functionality is the same, but the addition can cause locks. In this case you may need to run the migration later, but still need to deploy the code.

Our workflow is this: simple migrations (on small tables) can be done using rake db:migrate, but larger ones need to be run manually using third-party tools like, in our case for MySQL, https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-schema-change.html. If accidentally someone in our team runs such a larger migration, it could cause a lot of trouble for us (we recently had 30 minutes downtime because of a larger ALTER TABLE on our MySQL Galera cluster).

[will-in-wi]

This might be somewhat fixable by adding:

if ENV['RUN_MIGRATIONS'].present?
  require 'capistrano/rails/migrations'
end

to the Capfile, and then by running:

RUN_MIGRATIONS=true bundle exec cap production deploy:migrate

Is this a sane solution to this issue?

[mattbrictson]

That seems like a good solution to me. Would you be willing to open a PR to add that to the README?

[will-in-wi]

I'm beginning to wonder whether it would make sense to create some sort of "cookbook" page on the website with all of these solution types of things. I've closed a couple of tickets because someone found a decent workaround which we could document there. I'm not sure I want to add everything to the readme.

[will-in-wi]

The cookbook has been merged. Closing this feature request.