From schema.rb to structure sql

October 24th, 2016 - Bonn

We use materialized views and proceadures in our apps, which are not reflected on the schema.rb

To be able to use them in our tests and load the db structure without needing to run migrations, it should be enough to set config.active_record.schema_format = :sql and call rake db:structure:dump, but this task has currently an invalid option for postgres 9.5+

#   rake db:structure:dump
#   =>  pg_dump: invalid option -- i
#       Try "pg_dump --help" for more information.
#       rake aborted!
#       Error dumping database

This has been fixed in the stable release with this commit: Remove deprecated pg_dump -i flag and backported to several rails versions. If you rather keep using the tagged version from a gem server instead of pointing to github stable you can add this through an initializer like this one (depending on your activere_record version)

# initializers/remove_deprecated_pg_dump_flag_patch.rb

raise 'Can not patch this version of ActiveRecord' unless ActiveRecord::VERSION::STRING == '4.1.4'

module ActiveRecord
  module Tasks
    class PostgreSQLDatabaseTasks
      def structure_dump(filename)
        search_path = configuration['schema_search_path']
        unless search_path.blank?
          search_path = search_path.split(",").map{|search_path_part| "--schema=#{Shellwords.escape(search_path_part.strip)}" }.join(" ")

        command = "pg_dump -s -x -O -f #{Shellwords.escape(filename)} #{search_path} #{Shellwords.escape(configuration['database'])}"
        raise 'Error dumping database' unless Kernel.system(command), "a") { |f| f << "SET search_path TO #{ActiveRecord::Base.connection.schema_search_path};\n\n" }