Sequel and Heroku

Well, this turned out to be a bit harder than I expected, but with quite a bit of help from the Sequel, Ramaze, and Heroku lists, I got it worked out. The source code for this particular exercise is here. I'm only going to show a couple of files here as everything else you've already seen. First, here's how to do the migration in a rakefile ...

namespace :db do
    require 'rubygems'
    require 'sequel'
    Sequel.extension :migration

    task :migrate do
        m = Sequel::Migrator
        db = Sequel.connect(ENV['DATABASE_URL'] || 'sqlite://library.sqlite')
        dir = "dbMigration"

        target = ENV['TARGET'] ? ENV['TARGET'].to_i : nil
        current = ENV['CURRENT'] ? ENV['CURRENT'].to_i : nil

        m.run(db, dir, :target => target, :current => current)
    end
end

We create a sequel migrator and connect to the database. The database connection line contains two parts. The first side is if there's an environment variable named DATABASE_URL then we'll use that to connect to the database. This is an environment variable set by Heroku. If this isn't set, then we'll go ahead and connect to a sqlite database, library.sqlite. We use the Sequel.connect command rather than Sequel.sqlite as we don't know which type of database we're going to be using. On Heroku, it will be PostgreSQL and locally, we use sqlite. Next up, we set the directory where we'll keep our migrations, in this case, dbMigration which is my standard. After that, there's two lines used for telling sequel which version we're going to, target, and starting from, current. Finally, we run the migrator with the database, directory, target and current. The final two are part of a hashtable that's used by this migrator. You could also use m.apply where the first two parameters are the same and then pass the target and current as integers, but the migrator code seems to imply that the run version is preferred. To run this locally, simply do a rake db:migrate and it should migrate to the latest version. To move to a different version you can run rake TARGET=0 db:migrate to remove everything from the database. If you just want to move to the latest version, don't put a target or current in, they'll be nil, and it should just migrate to the latest. Now, to run it on Heroku and migrate the database there simply add heroku in front of the command as in heroku rake db:migrate after you've pushed all the code up to Heroku with a git push heroku master as we saw in the last post.

I haven't talked about rake before, so I should probably give a little background for it. It's a ruby version of the Unix make. It has tasks and commands to do them. The homepage for it is here and here is a nice article on using it.

OK, now let's take a look at our model file model/models.rb.

# The database should have been set up using the database migrations in
# the dbMigration directory. 
require 'rubygems'
require 'ramaze'
require 'sequel'

# Open the library's database. This must be done before we access the models
# that use it.
Sequel.connect(ENV['DATABASE_URL'] || 'sqlite://library.sqlite')

#
# This is the model for the authors and is backed by the :authors table in the
# database. 
#
# Create the Author model. 
class Author < Sequel::Model 
    many_to_many :books
end

#
# This is the model for the book and is backed by the :book table in the
# database. 
#
# Create the Book model. 
class Book < Sequel::Model 
    many_to_many :authors
end

This looks exactly like our previous models with a couple of exceptions. Here, we've moved our database connection into here from start.rb. It probably makes more sense here and keeps all of our Sequel code in one place (I got this idea from the Ramaze generated code). The connection itself looks surprisingly like our connection that was used in the rakefile. We end up using either a DATABASE_URL environment variable (supplied by Heroku) or the sqlite library.sqlite. After that, there are a couple of models that are in the database that we can use. The tables for the database and some data are created in the dbMigration/001_LibraryMigration.rb file.

You can see the end result of all of this here.

All of the code for this is up on github and as always, if you have questions, leave them in the comments.