Discussion on: Tips for Running Scripts in Production

View post

I recently came across this gem data-migrate which allows you to do data migrations like you do schema migrations.

One reason I am wary about doing data migrations in schema migrations is bc sometimes they can take a large amount of time and if your schema migrations are executed inline with your deploy pipeline that can block a deploy. At DEV we use DataUpdateScripts which is pretty similar but it runs asynchronously in the background.

Set Up Framework For Running Data Update Scripts #6025

mstruve posted on Feb 11, 2020

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[x] Feature

Description

While hooking up our first Elasticsearch model Tags, I realized that in order for search to work I would have to manually reindex all of the tags in our database before the search code went live. This is not a huge deal for us, but it means an extra undocumented step that others who are using this codebase might miss. This framework would give us the ability to run scripts like this the same way we run migrations.

module DataUpdateScripts
  class IndexTags
    def run
      Tag.find_each(&:index_to_elasticsearch)
    end
  end
end

A script like this would be deployed ahead of using the new data. When the app deploys or a local environment is updated the DataUpdateWorker would look at all the files in the data_update_scripts folder. Any file that has not been run, ie is not in our database, it will create a record for and then call run on that class.

We used something like this at my prior company because we had to keep 5+ VPCs data in sync and it worked out really well.

Why not use migrations? The reason we may want to separate this from migrations is so that it is not tied to our deploy process. In the past, I have had scripts that take hours to run bc they touch a lot of data and you don't want that holding up a deploy. This way a deploy goes out, kicks off a worker, and that worker does its thing in the background for however long it needs.

THOUGHTS?!