Update PostgreSQL enums with Rails migrations

Our data model at Pretto rely a lot on enums.

The standard solution in Rails would be to use ActiveRecord::Enum However, casting the values as integer in the database is not very human-readable, and some of our entities have multiple attributes with a common enum value. That’s why we decided to use PostgreSQL Enumerated types.

We had a beautiful honey moon with them until we had to change one label. Here is the workaround we built.

tl; dr

Spoiler Alert: do not use the helper of the tl;dr section.

Migration helpers

Sample migration

Details:

What do we do with the helper:

• Add the new label to the enum
• Update the column linked to the enum (each old label should become the new label)
• Alter the enum to delete the old label

NB: it is not possible to add a new label to an enum in a transaction, we must add self.disable_ddl_transaction! in the migration to use the helper.

It seems to be OK, but:

• it is a bad practice to update the pg_enum table
• if you are working with Heroku you don’t have the permission to update this table
• running the migration out of transaction means that we are f***ed if it somehow fails in the middle (and of course it happened)

That’s why we are not using the helper described above — even if it’s something we can find all over StackOverflow. Instead we use:

Migration helper (final)

In details:

• Fetch the enum labels from the data base
• Add the new label to the enum
• Rename the enum
• Create a new enum with the new labels
• Update the table to set each old value to the new one
• Update the table to map the column to the new enum
• Drop the old enum

It didn’t solved the transaction problem, so if you have a workaround for this feel free to comment :)

Bonus

Spec:

Migration helper spec