How to temporarily skip the pending migration check in Rails

Introduction

In a typical Rails development workflow, database migrations play a critical role in evolving the schema as the application grows.

Rails, by default, checks for pending migrations when starting the server, and if any exist, it raises an ActiveRecord::PendingMigrationError.

While this safeguard prevents inconsistencies, there are times when temporarily skipping this check can be helpful.

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Reproduce the error

Launch the server

rails server

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Open the page

localhost:3000

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Check the error

ActiveRecord::PendingMigrationError
Migrations are pending. To resolve this issue, run:
bin/rails db:migrate RAILS_ENV=development
You have 1 pending migration:

Output

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Solution

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Skip Migration pending

The first solution is to use the SKIP_PENDING_MIGRATIONS_CHECK=true command before you launch the server.

SKIP_PENDING_MIGRATIONS_CHECK=true rails server

OUtput

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Uncomment Migration check

In the application.rb file or in any of the environments file, such as the config/environments/development.rb file.

Change this line

  config.active_record.migration_error = :page_load

to

  config.active_record.migration_error = false

OUtput

If you do not have the previous line, just add it.

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Done

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