One of my tables in schema.rb wasn’t being dumped at all. At first I thought it had to do with a migration I reverted without applying it, but turns out it was because of a PostgreSQL enum column.

What happened

I added a new column to store a user’s role in the app. For some reason I decided to go with PostgreSQL enum. I created a custom type with my values, updated the model and migrated. I opened schema.rb and noticed this error:

# Could not dump table “users” because of following StandardError # Unknown type ‘user_role’ for column ‘role’

How I fixed it

Turns out, enum isn’t something ActiveRecord can map correctly, so I had to switch to dumping the schema in sql format. Pretty simple: update config/application.rb with the following line:

config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

Oh, and before I forget: here’s an immensly useful post with all rake db commands and what they do.

How I found the solution

Got error:

# Could not dump table “users” because of following StandardError # Unknown type ‘user_role’ for column ‘role’

• It’s because I’m using PostgreSQL with enum types that are not supported by Rails
  • Need to switch to using :sql for formatting as per this answer
    • Migrating to dump causes error:

      pg_dump -s -x -O -f pg_dump […] is installed in your PATH and has proper permissions.

      • Added ‘postgres/bin’ to path and it worked