nuxwin/ruckusing-migrations

Framework for generating and managing database migrations

Introduction

Ruckusing is a framework written in PHP5 for generating and managing a set of "database migrations". Database migrations are declarative files which represent the state of a DB (its tables, columns, indexes, etc) at a particular state of time. By using database migrations, multiple developers can work on the same application and be guaranteed that the application is in a consistent state across all remote developer machines., _(*1)

The idea of the framework was borrowed from the migration system built into Ruby on Rails. Any one who is familiar with Migrations in RoR will be immediately at home., _(*2)

Getting Started & Documentation

See the Wiki for the complete documentation on the migration methods supported and how to get started., _(*3)

Features

• Portability: the migration files, which describe the tables, columns, indexes, etc to be created are themselves written in pure PHP5 which is then translated to the appropriate SQL at run-time. This allows one to transparently support any RDBMS with a single set of migration files (assuming there is an adapter for it, see below)., _(*4)

• Extensibility: the framework is written with extensibility in mind and it is very modular. Support for new RDMBSs should be as easy as creating the appropriate adapter and implementing a single interface., _(*5)

• "rake" like support for basic tasks. The framework has a concept of "tasks" (in fact the primary focus of the framework, migrations, is just a plain task) which are just basic PHP5 classes which implement an interface. Tasks can be freely written and as long as they adhere to a specific naming convention and implement a specific interface, the framework will automatically register them and allow them to be executed., _(*6)

• The ability to go UP or DOWN to a specific migration state., _(*7)

• Code generator for generating skeleton migration files., _(*8)

• Out-of-the-box support for basic tasks like initializing the DB schema info table (db:setup), asking for the current version (db:version) and dumping the current schema (db:schema)., _(*9)

Limitations

• PHP5 is a hard requirement. The framework employes extensive use of object-oriented features of PHP5. There are no plans to make the framework backwards compatible., _(*10)

• As of August 2007, only the MySQL RDBMS is supported., _(*11)