Question

Looks like the new rails version has “change” versus self.up and self.down methods.

So what happens when one has to roll back a migration how does it know what actions to perform. I have the following method that I need to implement based on an online tutorial:

class AddImageToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column :users, :image_file_name, :string
    add_column :users, :image_content_type, :string
    add_column :users, :image_file_size, :integer
    add_column :users, :image_updated_at, :datetime
  end

  def self.down
    remove_column :users, :image_file_name, :string
    remove_column :users, :image_content_type, :string
    remove_column :users, :image_file_size, :integer
    remove_column :users, :image_updated_at, :datetime
  end    
end

How can I do the same using the new change method?

Answer 1

For many operations rails can guess what is the inverse operation (without problems). For example, in your case what is the reverse operation of add_column to call when you rollback? Of course it’s remove_column. What is the inverse of create_table? It’s drop_table. So in these cases rails know how to rollback and define a down method is superfluous (you can see in the documentation the methods currently supported from the change method).

But pay attention because for some kind of operation you still need to define the down method, for example if you change the precision of a decimal column how to guess the original precision on rollback? It’s not possible, so you need to define the down method.

As said, I suggest you to read the Rails Migrations Guide.