There are a variety of reasons you may want or need to rename a database or table column in your Rails application. Accomplishing this is quite simple.
Create a New Migration
This can be called whatever you’d like:
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rails g migration ChangeNames |
Update Your Migration
You can change as many column names as you want in this migration:
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class ChangeNames < ActiveRecord::Migration def change rename_column :table, :old_name, :new_name rename_column :table, :old_name, :new_name end end |
Migrate
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rake db:migrate |
Make sure you replace all references to the previous column names in your application, or you’ll experience errors when accessing views containing the former names. The data will automatically be transferred.
Koren Leslie Cohen
Product manager at Facebook. Former senior product manager at Dollar Shave Club in Los Angeles and software engineer at J.Crew / Madewell in New York City. Recovering trial lawyer.
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Wellington Torrejais da Silva says
April 2, 2015 at 1:58 pmThanks
Koren Leslie Cohen says
April 2, 2015 at 2:02 pmNo prob 😉
Andre says
August 31, 2015 at 2:30 pmthis was very helpful and simple !!!!
thank you
Koren Leslie Cohen says
September 15, 2015 at 1:46 pmYou’re welcome!
Francisco says
June 20, 2016 at 9:50 amIf you’d need to change a table name you can do it like this:
rename_table :old_table_name, :new_table_name
min says
August 5, 2016 at 5:46 amIs it possible to add ‘remove_column’ or ‘add_column’ instead of using ‘rename_column’?
For example,
rails g migration ChangeNames
class ChangeNames < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
add_column :table, :name, :type
remove_column :table, :name
end
end