One of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails is the use of “migrations” for maintaining your DB. Migrations have proven to be pretty handy in keeping a local database in sync with the work of other developers.

In addition, it is the primary method of application deployment. Because migrations are incremental and they are done in a structured manner, it is a great way of pushing out new DB changes to the production database servers.

A colleague has been working on a new PHP-based project and was lamenting the lack of migrations. In retrospect, I wished a migrations framework was available for PHP, for all my projects.

So I sat down and wrote my own.

“Ruckusing Migrations” is a migrations framework for PHP5 (PHP5 only - absolutely no plans for PHP4 compatibility). The framework is very modular and makes extensive use of the object-oriented features of PHP5, namely interfaces and reflection.

But onto the good stuff. Some features of the framework:

• Portability: it was written with portability in mind. All DB calls go through an adapter interface so support for new RDBMS should be very easy. Currently, only MySQL support is available out of the box.
• Generic task interface. The framework uses task files, which are just PHP5 classes which adhere to a basic naming convention. Because these follow a convention they are automatically loaded and registered into the framework for use.
• Rich API for database manipulation. Database-level operations, table-level operations, column-level operations and execution of arbitrary queries is all supported..
• More good stuff.

Release 1.0 is on Google Code and can be checked out via anonymous SVN.

See the project homepage for downloads and documentation.

Of course, please contact me with any questions or comments.

codycaughlan % gmail % com

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Database, PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.