Rails DB Migration – How To Drop a Table?

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I added a table that I thought I was going to need, but now no longer plan on using it. How should I remove that table?

I’ve already run migrations, so the table is in my database. I figure rails generate migration should be able to handle this, but I haven’t figured out how yet.

I’ve tried: 

rails generate migration drop_tablename

but that just generated an empty migration.

What is the “official” way to drop a table in Rails?

24 s
24

Write your migration manually. E.g. run rails g migration DropUsers.

As for the code of the migration I’m just gonna quote Maxwell Holder’s post Rails Migration Checklist

BAD – running rake db:migrate and then rake db:rollback will fail

class DropUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    drop_table :users
  end
end

GOOD – reveals intent that migration should not be reversible

class DropUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def up
    drop_table :users
  end

  def down
    fail ActiveRecord::IrreversibleMigration
  end
end

BETTER – is actually reversible

class DropUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    drop_table :users do |t|
      t.string :email, null: false
      t.timestamps null: false
    end
  end
end

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