Question

I’ve got a one-off script that I’m using to load some data into my application’s database.

This is kind of large-ish so I’ve gist’d it here: https://gist.github.com/097fb5a30ce84522077a

The code as written works flawlessly when executing against a local Postgres instance on my local machine (or even a remote instance) as specified by the DATABASE_URL environment variable.

However, it will absolutely not work from Heroku. Executing the ruby script linked gives me this error:

~ $ ruby importprofiles.rb
/app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activerecord-3.2.9/lib/active_record/attribute_assignment.rb:88:in `block in assign_attributes': unknown attribute: owner_id
(ActiveRecord::UnknownAttributeError)

My workflow is basically:

• Create the app on Heroku (heroku create mybot)
• Push the code up (git commit -m 'initial commit' && git push heroku master)
• Set up the database (heroku run rake db:setup)
• Restart the instance (heroku restart)
• Invoke a Bash shell on the heroku instance (heroku run bash)
• Use Curl to pull down my production profiles.ini from a server (curl http://blah.com/profiles.ini > profiles.ini)
• Run the script (ruby importprofiles.rb)

Why am I getting unknown attribute errors on Heroku for code that works locally?

Answer 1

Your schema.rb doesn’t match your real database or you’ve never tried to use a Profile owner for anything. You have this in schema.rb:

create_table "profiles", :force => true do |t|
  t.string   "title",   :limit => 100
  t.integer  "owner"
  t.datetime "timeset"
  t.string   "whoset"
end

The t.integer "owner" defines a column named owner in the profiles table but you need an owner_id column.

Perhaps you did a manual alter table to rename the column in your development environment. Or maybe this is the first time you’ve gone along this code path.

In any case, you need a migration to rename profiles.owner to profiles.owner_id. Or, since you’re just getting started, you could hand-edit schema.rb to rename the column and the rebuild your Heroku database. I’d just patch schema.rb by hand and start again if you don’t have any data to worry about.