A gem to help you document your Rails ActiveRecord model

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I’ve been using the “annotate” gem for a while and it’s simple whilst incredibly useful. Essentially once run it documents each resource in your database within the appropriate file. Here’s how to get it working.

Step 1

Install the gem. There are a few ways to do this but I usually include the following line in my Gemfile:

[code language=”ruby”]
gem ‘annotate’
[/code]

Then run “bundle install” from the command line.

Step 2

Generate the schema annotations by running:

[code language=”bash”]

annotate

[/code]

in the root of your rails project directory and it will inject the schema details for each “table” into the respective “model.rb” file e.g. “user.rb” might contain:

[code language=”ruby”]
# == Schema Information
#
# Table name: users
#
# id :integer not null, primary key
# screen_name :string(255)
# name :string(255)
# created_at :datetime
# updated_at :datetime
#
[/code]

2 thoughts on “A gem to help you document your Rails ActiveRecord model”

  1. Great find, I’m a total RoR noob (but learning) and I was like “WHERE ARE ALLL THE PROPERTIES IN MY MODEL!!!!!”. Then I realized the meta data is stored in db/schema.rb, but this is really more of a script to help generate a schema, not really document it.

    I want to go to a model and see all the fields that comprise it gosh darnit!

    But of course this didn’t work for me initially, I swear getting gems to work together is the hardest thing about rails. I am using the ‘thin’ gem for web server on heroku but if this is included in your local file on windows bundle install will fail. Once I finally commented out the thin gem I could get this installed and run it.

    -Jason

    Reply

  2. I ended up making my gem file like this:

    group :production do
    #postgres gem for deployment on heroku
    gem ‘pg’

    #use thin for webserver on heroku
    gem ‘thin’
    end

    And then run: “bundle install –without production”

    Reply

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