Rails - authoritative source for your database schema?
- by keruilin
I have Rails app, and every once in a while, when I bring new developer onboard they exclaim that they should be able to produce the current DB schema in their dev environment by running the whole history of the migrations. I personally don't think that migrations is the authoritative source for your schema. Right now what we do is load a production copy of the DB, with the current schema, onto the dev machine. And, from there, the schema can be maintained via incremental migrations.
So my question are:
What is the authoritative source of your schema on a Rails project?
What is now considered the best-practice way to maintain your DB schema?
