Question

I am installing the devise gem for authentication in a Ruby on Rails application and I ran the database migration like this:

rake db:migrate

and got this error:

undefined method `reference' for #<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0x9322248>

This is a bit cryptic. Where should I go to debug this and what could the problem be?

The only non-standard thing I did was give it the table name “users” which is my table name in this previous command: rails generate devise users

Also, my routes.rb file has this new entry:

devise_for :users

Probably the issue is mis-matched columns in my database and what the auth package thinks the users table should be like. Where do I look to see what the auth package thinks the columns are like? And where do I find where the create-table command is for the users table that I have. It was made with the scaffold command originally which put a whole bunch of extra and useless things in my system.

My db/migrate/users/create_users file looks like this:

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :users do |t|

      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :users
  end
end

Which is basic, but my users table in the db has these columns:

+------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field            | Type             | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| uid              | int(10) unsigned | NO   | PRI | 0       |       |
| name             | varchar(60)      | NO   | UNI |         |       |
| pass             | varchar(128)     | NO   |     |         |       |
| mail             | varchar(254)     | YES  | MUL |         |       |
| theme            | varchar(255)     | NO   |     |         |       |
| signature        | varchar(255)     | NO   |     |         |       |
| signature_format | varchar(255)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| created          | int(11)          | NO   | MUL | 0       |       |
| access           | int(11)          | NO   | MUL | 0       |       |
| login            | int(11)          | NO   |     | 0       |       |
| status           | tinyint(4)       | NO   |     | 0       |       |
| timezone         | varchar(32)      | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| language         | varchar(12)      | NO   |     |         |       |
| picture          | int(11)          | NO   |     | 0       |       |
| init             | varchar(254)     | YES  |     |         |       |
| data             | longblob         | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+

And I am not sure how such an inconsistency can exist after I run the migrate command. Where does it take instructions from if not the above file I posted?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I suggest you run the db:migrate command with the –trace option:

rake db:migrate --trace

As an example, I purposely added a syntax error in my devise migration and this is a fragment of the output I got. As you can see, the –trace option should point you to the exact error (migration file + line #).

    undefined method `strin' for #<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0x00000106c5ea98>
    /Users/#####/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@rails3/gems/activerecord-3.0.5/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/schema_definitions.rb:326:in `method_missing'
    /Users/#####/rails/$$$$$$/db/migrate/20101031153010_devise_create_users.rb:13:in `block in up'
    /Users/#####/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@rails3/gems/activerecord-3.0.5/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/schema_statements.rb:157:in `create_table'
...

Note that your migration files are located under the db/migrate directory. So given the above error, I would need to open up the db/migrate/20101031153010_devise_create_users.rb migration file and fix the error on line 13.