Too many migrations in application makes it painful. Sometimes they are written a long time back, that now you do not even remember. At the point you might want to replace them with something simple and compact.

Rails have a gem for this utility, called squasher. It eventually scans all the migrations in application and converts them into a single migration named InitSchema. Let's see by example.

• Installation
  1. Include gem squasher in Gemfile and run
     $ bundle install
  2. To work effectively run
     $ bundle binstub squasher
     and you will have runner inside bin folder.

Now we are set to use squasher.

• Usage
  1. Let’s consider we need to squash all migrations before 2018. Simply run
     $ squasher 2018
     and squasher will create two migrations InitSchema and SquasherClean. InitSchema will be the new migration for all the migrations before 2018. Squasher afterward deletes all those now-redundent migrations.

Yes it is that simple!

Let’s go down some depth

• Does Rails versioning affect our way?
  –> Yes. By default squasher will not generate any rails versioning for newly generated migration. So there are high chances it may break during migrations.
  To counter it, squasher simply comes with option -
  -m, --migration=VERSION. It define the rails migration version(since Rails 5)

• Can I squash migrations before a specific date?
  –> Yes. Simply run squash command like
  $ squasher 2019/12/09
  It will squash migrations before 09 December, 2019.