Simple and easy way to use ActiveRecord without Rails

Posted on by urubatan

After a question in my other post about how to use sidekiq without rails, I decided to also post here how to use ActiveRecord without Rails

But Just to simplify things a lot, I’ll show how to do it using only one file, then you can split it up in your projects.

require 'active_record'
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection({adapter: :sqlite3, database: 'test.db'})
 
 
 
class CreateTestModel < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.1]
  def change
    create_table :test_models do |t|
      t.string :name
    end
  end
end
 
CreateTestModel.migrate :up
 
class TestModel < ActiveRecord::Base
end
 
TestModel.create(name: 'First Test')
TestModel.create(name: 'Second Test')

As you can see, what you need is pretty simple, you just need to:

  • load the ‘active_record’ gem
  • establish the connection passing a hash with the configuration
  • running your migrations
  • creating your model classes
  • And using your models as you would normally in a Rails application

But how can we improve that?

You can merge this with the standalone sidekiq sample from the other post, split the files in their own directory instead of using only one file for everything, and just be happy loading only the gems you need!

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