Veksel keeps seperate databases for every branch in your development environment. This makes it easy to experiment with schema changes and data with less risk and avoid conflicting changes to schema.rb when branches have different sets of migrations. The inspiration for the gem came from branch support in Neon.
Postgresql is currently the only supported database driver.
Out of the box, Veksel requires explicit invocation to work. Refer to Git hook below if you're interested in a more automated approach.
Checkout a new branch and run bundle exec veksel fork. A new database with a suffix matching your branch name will be created and tmp/restart.txt will be touched so your application servers restart. Both database structure and contents will be copied from your primary development database and Veksel will tell Rails on boot that the forked database should be used.
When moving back to your main branch, run touch tmp/restart.txt to make Rails connect to default development database.
The CLI supports the following commands
veksel fork Create a forked database
veksel clean Delete forked databases
veksel fork Fork the database from the main branch
veksel list List forked databases
You can also run the commands as rake tasks (e.g. bin/rails veksel:list), albeit with a penalty hit.
Add the following to .git/hooks/post-checkout to automatically fork your database when checking out a branch:
#!/bin/sh
bundle exec veksel fork
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem "veksel", group: :developmentAnd then execute:
$ bundleOr install it yourself as:
$ gem install veksel- Promote a forked database to main
- Explicit/optional branching
- Other database drivers
# Bump version number in lib/veksel/version.rb
# Update lockfile
bundle install
# Update changelog, review manually before committing
conventional-changelog -p conventionalcommits -i CHANGELOG.md -s
git commit -m 'chore(release): x.y.z'
git push origin
git tag vx.y.z
git push origin vx.y.z
# Build and push gem
gem build
gem push veksel-x.y.z.gem
# Upload the veksel-x-y-z.gem file to the Github release pageVeksel is sponsored by Skalar
Veksel is licensed under MIT.