Custom Rake Tasks for db:drop db:create db:migrate db:seed

Resetting the database in Ruby seems to be quite a painful task if you (or your team) make changes to the seed data / schema. rake db:drop db:create db:migrate db:seed is too verbose. Provided below are two custom rake tasks based on Justin French’s blog post here:

    rake db:rdb (reset database)
    rake db:trdb (reset database in test environment)

The first is equivalent to rake db:drop db:create db:migrate db:seed. The second is for test databases and will not perform a seed. It is equivalent to RAILS_ENV=test rake db:drop db:create db:migrate. Note that the second tasks actually ignores the current environment and will always use the ‘test’ environment.

Create a file under RAILS_ROOT/lib/tasks/db.rake and paste the code below. The new tasks should both show up with a rake -T.

namespace :db do
  desc "Drop, create, migrate then seed the database"
  task :rdb => :environment do
    Rake::Task['db:drop'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:create'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:migrate'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:seed'].invoke
  end

  desc "Drop, create, migrate the database with RAILS_ENV=test"
  task :trdb => :environment do
    Rails.env = 'test'
    Rake::Task['db:drop'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:create'].invoke
    Rake::Task['db:migrate'].invoke
  end
end