Purge or recreate a Ruby on Rails database

I have a dev Ruby on Rails database full of data. I want to delete everything and rebuild the database. I'm thinking of using something like:

rake db:recreate

Is this possible?

Solution 1:

I know two ways to do this:

This will reset your database and reload your current schema with all:

rake db:reset db:migrate

This will destroy your db and then create it and then migrate your current schema:

rake db:drop db:create db:migrate

All data will be lost in both scenarios.

Solution 2:

On Rails 4, all needed is

$ rake db:schema:load

That would delete the entire contents on your DB and recreate the schema from your schema.rb file, without having to apply all migrations one by one.

Solution 3:

I use the following one liner in Terminal.

$ rake db:drop && rake db:create && rake db:migrate && rake db:schema:dump && rake db:test:prepare

I put this as a shell alias and named it remigrate

By now, you can easily "chain" Rails tasks:

$ rake db:drop db:create db:migrate db:schema:dump db:test:prepare # db:test:prepare no longer available since Rails 4.1.0.rc1+

Solution 4:

Update: In Rails 5, this command will be accessible through this command:

rails db:purge db:create db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

As of the newest rails 4.2 release you can now run:

rake db:purge 

Source: commit

# desc "Empty the database from DATABASE_URL or config/database.yml for the current RAILS_ENV (use db:drop:all to drop all databases in the config). Without RAILS_ENV it defaults to purging the development and test databases."
  task :purge => [:load_config] do
    ActiveRecord::Tasks::DatabaseTasks.purge_current
  end

It can be used together like mentioned above:

rake db:purge db:create db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test